
Goodbye, Sweet Girl
A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival
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Narrated by:
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Andi Arndt
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By:
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Kelly Sundberg
In this brave and beautiful memoir, written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liar’s Club, a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuse - examining the tenderness and violence entwined in the relationship, why she endured years of physical and emotional pain, and how she eventually broke free.
"You made me hit you in the face", he said mournfully. "Now everyone is going to know." "I know", I said. "I’m sorry."
Kelly Sundberg’s husband, Caleb, was a funny, warm, supportive man and a wonderful father to their little boy Reed. He was also vengeful and violent. But Sundberg did not know that when she fell in love, and for years told herself he would get better. It took a decade for her to ultimately accept that the partnership she desired could not work with such a broken man. In her remarkable book, she offers an intimate record of the joys and terrors that accompanied her long, difficult awakening, and presents a haunting, heartbreaking glimpse into why women remain too long in dangerous relationships.
To understand herself and her violent marriage, Sundberg looks to her childhood in Salmon, a small, isolated mountain community known as the most redneck town in Idaho. Like her marriage, Salmon is a place of deep contradictions, where Mormon ranchers and hippie back-to-landers live side-by-side; a place of magical beauty riven by secret brutality; a place that takes pride in its individualism and rugged self-sufficiency, yet is beholden to church and communal standards at all costs.
Mesmerizing and poetic, Goodbye, Sweet Girl is a harrowing, cautionary, and ultimately redemptive tale that brilliantly illuminates one woman’s transformation as she gradually rejects the painful reality of her violent life at the hands of the man who is supposed to cherish her, begins to accept responsibility for herself, and learns to believe that she deserves better.
©2018 Kelly Sundberg (P)2018 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...




















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Leaves you mid-story
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Lovely
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Too Much Background
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true and touching
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I read for the art of the writing as much, if not more than, the content. I don't read a lot of memoirs and I wonder if I would feel differently if I were more accustomed to the style, but I did not love the writing. The events were heart-wrenching but the prose stunted the delivery to me.
I wish she had spent significantly less time writing about the boy who chased her with a knife, the time she was almost kidnapped, random snippets of fucked up men that she came across up until her late teens. All digs in the well of trauma, no doubt, but it felt unnecessary to me and a bit like an attack on the male as a gender. With that being said, she does dig into women who let her down in various ways as well. We are products of our environment, we develop healthy or unhealthy attachment styles early on, but I would have preferred a focus on the other end; "How I've Moved Beyond Codependency," not "What Led Me to Codependency." I can appreciate her desire to place the reader in her isolated world and to explain how her past may have led to getting trapped in a cycle of abuse, but the delivery of the buildup to her relationship with Caleb seemed to drive a wedge between me and the book.
Grateful to Kelly S
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The protagonist’s first-hand reflections, which are artfully woven into the narrative, effectively explain how a seemingly smart, independent woman could slip into an abusive relationship. Sometimes the “explanations” are a little heavy handed in the context of a novel but not intrusively so.
There are chunks of the narrative that explore geographies, events and issues not really central to the story, and I found many of those annoying. With that said, if you enjoy lengthy descriptions of landscapes and “side trips” of that nature, you probably would not be bothered.
I found the narrator’s voice quite monotone and inexpressive. Seemed to drone and wasn’t a strong timber.
Overall, a solid if meandering and slow read.
Good read; annoying narrator
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Urgently honest and hopeful and insightful
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I was shocked when I noticed the book was almost done. nothing dramatic really happened. abuse is abuse but to write a book about it, usually it's pretty bad with a survivor type plot.
very dull book
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Excellent
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Encouraging
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