"We all hit each other"

Loteria cards

A fantastic recent novel that deals with childhood trauma and domestic violence is Mario Alberto Zambrano’s Lotería.  The novel is beautifully narrated by Luz, an eleven-year-old girl in state custody.  She uses a deck of Lotería (a Mexican version of bingo) cards to work through her childhood, dealing with domestic violence, her father’s alcoholism, and the death of her sister.  Zambrano deals with trauma tenderly, yet realistically, and shows how Luz works through her past and finds the humanity of her father despite the violence.

In the realm of memoir, Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls focuses primarily on her rootless childhood.  The memoir itself sometimes takes the form of Walls working through the challenges she faced growing up, how she survived and moved to New York at seventeen to get away from her parents.  Yet again, through all their difficulties and abuses, Walls never loses sight of her parents’ humanity.

Both of these stories follow young girls with alcoholic fathers, and in each case the girl is doggedly loyal to her father, in spite of temper and tragedy.  Something about the complexity of that relationship creates so much emotion and depth within these stories, and hopefully brings awareness to the problems that many young girls face.  As much as Luz and Walls work through their pasts, domestic violence still affects their lives significantly. 

Writing can provide a way for childhood abuse victims to work through their past, and a way for writers to bring awareness to an issue that will likely always be around.  Stories can bring powerful change, and these are only two examples of serious books with deep takes childhood forged in a crucible.