Skin Game: A Cutter's Memoir (review)

256Fourth Genre This is her family story, a rich example ofmarriage and love, a story to be read and shared. Reviewed by Amy Brown Skin Game: A Cutter's Memoir by Caroline Kettlewell St. Martin's Press, 2000 192 pages, paperback, $11.95 Often we walk through this world bleary-eyed, stumbling, feeUng like outsiders . Often we hurt so badly on the inside that we long for some reflection ofthis pain to be evident on the outside. It is not often that we choose to cut ourselves. It is even rarer that someone who makes this choice decides to teU others about it. Caroline KettleweU is this rare person. In the Skin Game KetdeweU openly discusses her life as a cutter. She freely talks about when she first started cutting herself in the seventh grade to the time when she stopped. "The funny thing about süence is that it always makes the thing not mentioned seem as though it must be so much worse than it is," so much so that this is the first memoir written regarding this subject. When KettleweU was first caught cutting her arm with a Swiss Army knife in the girl's bathroom at school, she was prompdy sent to the office. Her mother was called. The adults mumbled a few words of concern, asked her not to do it again, then sent her on her way. KettleweU explains, "What that silence meant to me was that I had committed an act so appaUing as to be UteraUy unspeakable." As a result, KettleweU knew that she had to keep her cutting a secret. It was only to be disclosed to those who she wanted to love her, because maybe they would want to help her if they could see her pain through her scars and marks. So, the question remains, what was so wrong in Kettlewell's life that she made the choice to start cutting? Could "adolescent angst" (as her father caUed it) cause this? KettleweU claims, "There was no way there could be anything reaUy wrong with twelve-year-old me." Yet, something obviously was awry, right? Maybe not. Herein lies the beauty of this book, the mystery that fafls to be unraveled. The only thing that really seems to be wrong with KettleweU is that she sees the world around her with a keen, delicate, and unique eye. At twelve she tries to argue that she is reaUy thirteen, ifyou count the months Book Reviews257 that she was in the womb. She views the world as if she can reconstruct it completely to meet her own needs. And what is wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. Though readers may never know why KettleweU chose to cut herself, they are likely to see a bit of themselves in her. After aU, "this is a story about how an ordinary sort ofperson can end up traveling some dark and unexpected roads." How fortunate the reader is that KettleweU chose to pack us a bag and take us along with her on this brave journey. Reviewed by Amy Hicks The Circle of Hanh by Bruce Weigl Grove Press, 2000 208 pages, cloth, $24.00 In the prologue to his stark, yet uplifting memoir, The Circle ofHanh, poet and translator Bruce Weigl writes, "I don't know how it aU happened. I'm not even sure I want to remember everything. I don't believe remembering everything is necessary for our happiness or weU-being. I have only a story and my beliefin the abflity ofstories to save us." This book is not solely the chronicle of an American soldier's experience in Vietnam, though several harrowing moments of his 1967-68 service in that war are detailed within these pages. In this postwar era, when so many veterans have now pubUshed accounts oftheir roles in that tragic conflict,Weigl begins and concludes his with the story of a man who returns, twenty-eight years after serving, to Southeast Asia to adopt an eight-year-old girl named Hanh from an orphanage in the People's RepubUc ofVietnam. The prologue and eight titled sections of The Circle of Hanh teU the reader, in fifty-three dramatic...