In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

I had to unlearn the most important lesson I had learned as a child, the most important rule of survival—to be quiet.

Like so many women before me and since, I learned that you go back, you stick it out, you love the man until he is saved by your sacrifice. It’s the kind of thing you can always see going so badly in someone else’s life, but not in your own.

We fight the demons that embedded themselves into the fabric of our consciousness, not knowing why we always feel like we’re in a fight. We walk through the world as if we are part of it, but our anguish constantly reminds us that the world neither loves nor wants things that are broken.

Pain is a place, a substance, a state of being: I am in pain.

It turns out that putting someone back together is much more difficult than keeping them whole in the first place.

As a girl, I was yoked with the desire to please. As a boy, my brother was saddled with the command to dominate.