Randy Susan Meyers (2014) Accidents of Marriage. London, Simon & Schuster. 978-1-4711-4044-0

 

This is a book about a family - the mother a well-respected social worker who is passionate about her work and the father a successful, leading public defender. The mother works with families where domestic abuse occurs and begins to look at her outwardly perfect marriage and question what she is prepared to tolerate.
 
[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]
[Spoiler alert]
 
The story follows the family as they navigate the complications of two working parents and three children. The mother, Maddy, works with women in abusive relationships, supporting them when they leave their relationships – and then goes home to her husband whose moods swing from the loving to the angry at a moment’s notice.
 
Ben considers his work to have primacy and claims less responsibility for the household and their children’s needs. This comes to a head when Maddy leaves for work early leaving him to drop them at camp and then rescue her when her car breaks down. In his anger he engages in a road rage incident which cumulates in a horrific crash where Maddy is thrown from the vehicle and ends up with horrific head injuries, leaving her in a coma and with long-term physical and mental disabilities.
 
Ben, who has also been having an affair with a trainee at his firm, avoids telling Maddy the details of the cause of the accident and revels in her neediness and devotion to him. His emotional abusive behaviour is directed towards their eldest daughter who finally cracks and tells her mother the truth about the accident.
 
Maddy begins to recover memories around his anger and abuse and cannot forgive him for reducing her life to how it is now – and for his deceit. She decides she can no longer live with him, but as he pleads that he can change, she is unable to close the door on their relationship entirely.
 
I really appreciated this book as it did, for once, focus on some of the more subtle forms of domestic abuse and less on the direct physical harm and abuse. It also resonated in that the protagonist didn’t recognise that what she was experiencing was domestic abuse, despite supporting other women in abusive relationships as they attempted to leave.
 
Although the centre of the book is about Maddy’s accident and recovery, the emotional and mental abuse is detailed in the early chapters and again towards the end. It also recognises the difficulties of leaving a marriage where you have invested so much.

The author is writing from her experience of working with women experiencing domestic abuse.