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From the first page, it is obvious that T. K. did not hire an editor to spruce up the story, but who cares? For example, in the opening sentence, the conditional will should be would: “I lay in bed in the darkness wondering what the next day will bring.” As it stands, this reader wondered if we were in the present or the past. The ambiguity alerts the reader that the story she’s going to get is mainlined from the heart, without regard to the finer points of grammar.
T. K. gives the reader information that a more sophisticated writer might avoid as distracting, such as where the tampons are if you get taken to jail when you have your period.
Without second thoughts about how the story is developing, she descends to the lowest point a mother could go when her children are taken from her. The reader may tire of her floods of hysterical tears, but that is how this real mother reacted. T. K. doesn’t stop crying because it’s literarily enough; she stops when real life brings the tears to an end.
The innocent writing style does not allow for the pulsing of paragraphs; whole pages go by without a break. It is reminiscent of a stream of consciousness style, but I doubt T. K. has ever studied that. The lack of paragraphs blurs the timeline and the cause-and-effect flow, but a writer looking for enlightenment about paragraphs will notice that this disorientation could work, with some tweaks. A mother in crisis doesn’t know what time it is.
Her erotic scenes are hot.
In A SILENCED MOTHER, readers will feast on a slice of life worthy of Paddy Chayefsky or Guy de Maupassant, but without the artifice.
Writers can benefit from reading it because they will see what happens when you let the tears run and the bloody heart reach out, when you let life happen without the controlling modifications they taught you in your MFA class.
T. K. touches the searing, life-or-death buttons of life. Would you, dear writer, dare to do the same? Would you survive the process of doing so? I’ll admit right here that there are events in my own life that I have found it impossible to record without risking depression and what sometimes feels like death.