Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure

Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure

A searing portrait of a mother’s body—a resurrection and reclamation of pleasure after abuse, a study of intergenerational trauma, and a love letter to the bodies of women: as alive and unbound as the teeming Mississippi wilds that bear witness Four months postpartum with her second child, Catherine Simone Gray is back at her doctor’s office, surveying a childbirth wound that refuses to mend. Proud flesh : tissue that overheals to become its own wound. Pregnancy and motherhood had been physically vulnerable for Gray, but this renders her most intimate parts unrecognizable—like her body is no longer her own. Has it ever been her own ? As she gets to know her body in its new form, she encounters, too, the girl she’d been at seventeen. It was summertime in Mississippi—wild, pulsing with life—when a man coerced her into an abusive relationship that would dominate her life for four years. Told in parallel timelines, Proud Flesh grapples with the legacy of intimate partner violence in motherhood. With luminous prose and breathtaking viscerality, Gray makes legible the ways that abuse can imprint on our body and seethe undetected for years. She lays bare unspoken truths: that violence remaps how we connect with and care for our children. That the pains of our mothers—and our mothers’ mothers—endure, and can prowl the edges of our stories too. That even amid pain, our bodies can teach us new truths about our capacity to heal and experience pleasure. Proud Flesh rewrites the body of the mother beyond the borders—bold, defiant, and heart-stoppingly true, it’s an unputdownable memoir and a force of nature. “I could not put this book down.... A fresh vibrant narrative for mothers, women, and anyone who has dared to fully look at the scars of the past.” —MOLLY CARO MAY, author of Body Full of Stars   “ Proud Flesh is a debut memoir that defies genre. Erotic, heart-rending, unexpected, courageous, breathtaking.… This book pressed itself into me and I will be recommending it for years to come.” —KIMBERLY ANN JOHNSON, author of The Fourth Trimester   “With writing that is brutal and beautiful, Gray writes of motherhood and womanhood and, beyond that, of personhood, in ways that are cutting and gorgeous.” —ABIGAIL ROSE CLARKE, author of Returning Home to Our Bodies CATHERINE SIMONE GRAY is a writer and educator whose writings on her blog Unsilenced Woman have captivated audiences globally of up to 2.5 million. An Emerging Writer in Roxane Gay's The Audacity , Gray has also published essays in The Bitter Southerner and The Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape . She is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship by the Mississippi Arts Commission. Her writings on motherhood has been shared by respected organizations for new mothers, such as La Leche League, International Cesarean Awareness Network, and ImprovingBirth. She has been a guest on The Birth Hour, a #1 podcast in iTunes Kids & Family. She has delivered three addresses at the Mississippi Womanist Rally. With an M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction, she teaches writing classes for women, mothers, and caregivers. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi with her husband and their two children. I’m back in the bathtub for soothing the nub of my scars. I find my fingers typing hypergranulation in Google again. It’s like running my finger across prayer beads, a ritual now, connecting the reality of my body to some vast web of knowledge and nature. I click my way through articles and find these words: proud flesh. The term is often used to describe the granulation tissue that is common on horse’s legs and hooves, the same scars I have. There’s even a medical definition: exuberant granulation tissue in a poorly healed wound, characterized by florid, ‘geographic’ scarring on the skin surface. Suddenly it feels like a brilliance the way my wound has worked overtime toward healing, creating a garden of tissue around the tear. Exuberant. Florid. Those are my vagina’s words. Proud flesh . Like my body wanted to sing its own perspective from the wound. What has been concealed will grow barbs and flower. Tenderest act of survival. They burned my vagina once, twice, three times, four. They burned my vagina five times, six times, seven times, eight. My hands make ripples across the bath water while the lines play in my head like a nursery rhyme. But the words proud flesh also begin to rise in me. They keep rising in me as I towel myself off, as I soap the dishes, as I sit on the toilet, and push the stroller down my street the next day. Proud flesh. It sounds like a riot. Or a benediction.