In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

That didn’t make sense to me, though—I knew the world as a place where there is only so much love to go around, a finite amount of attention and care that any one person can give.

It would take years—decades, even—to understand that all my relationships perfectly met my low expectations. That it was not bad luck or a curse that doomed me to feel constant loss, but that my beliefs about the world would shape everything around me, that my childhood trauma would render it all as if through a glass, darkly.

I highlighted so many sentences and paragraphs in this book. I related to so much of it I eventually stopped highlighting because it just would've been the whole damn book. We didnt have the beautiful Appalachian woods as a backdrop to our little hell hole, but I did have a grandmas house to escape to and books and school. Only people who have been poor truly understand what it's like, and only people who had abusive parents understand how it shapes you and affects how you see yourself and the world and how hard it is to unlearn. It was hard to read at times, but shes a great writer, and I hope she writes more books.

You know how your father is, she said. At that moment, I began to understand how each of us—my brother, my mother, and myself—were very much alone in that house.

I’ve often wondered what happened that made my mother so easy to abuse, so helpless in the presence of my father. I grew up knowing that I had to be ready to leave a man—my husband, a lover, the father of my children—and that I had to mean it.