Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice (review)

Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice by Kathleen B. Jones. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999, 190 pp., $26.00 hardcover.

Those who have experienced trauma and loss know that new losses replicate prior grief and sorrow, offering an opportunity for reflection and deeper understanding about what such losses tell us about ourselves. Too often, people pass up this opportunity in an attempt to get past the pain. In Living Between Danger and Love, however, Kathleen Jones takes it up ambivalently but courageously. Most immediately, the book is an attempt to fathom the death of Andrea O'Donnell, a women's studies student at Jones's university who was strangled by her boyfriend in November 1994. Jones takes this tragedy as a lens through which to examine her own life's traumas and losses. But this book is not a mere psychological autobiography; it is a social history of women's lives. Jones's adulthood begins at the same time as the women's movement in 1968, and they echo one another repeatedly, producing a narrative that weaves a complicated but remarkable tapestry of an individual life forged within a larger context of dramatic social change and upheaval.

What Jones's reflections produce is insight into "the limits of choice," the ways in which women and men are expected to make "unreasonable choices" between equally problematic alternatives: leaving someone you love versus protecting your physical and/or emotional safety; pursuing a fulfilling relationship versus losing your child because that relationship marks you as a "bad" mother; salvaging your emotional health by separating from an emotionally dependent parent versus losing that parent to self-destructive behavior. Such choices reveal, Jones suggests, "the hollowness of the word 'choice,'" a concept which too often "seems utterly beside the point" (2). The limits of choice stem from the complexity of life. The human temptation is to resist this complication, to suppress the "incessant nagging ronda of what ifs," guilt, and confusion (73). After all, the boyfriend was a drug user, and nobody can save an addict from himself. But Jones replies, should O'Donnell have been murdered for not realizing that? Or was she murdered because she did realize that and had decided to leave him? How do you leave safely, and yet honor the love you have felt; "How do you prepare yourself for a choke hold from someone you love" (48)? Indeed, why do we love the people we do? Are we to be blamed for our loving? In what sense do we "choose" to love, and how does that love make us "unable to reason in the face of choice" (2)?

That there are no easy answers to these questions is, after all, the point of the story. Jones tells it skillfully. The book is moving, powerful, provocative, making readers think about their own lives in different ways. The writing is at times quite poetic, and I found myself often mesmerized by the narrative, which moved back and forth in time like a novel, weaving together events that at first glance seem quite unrelated.

An important theme of this struggle is secrets, the danger to women of keeping secret the trauma of their lives and relationships, their silence about the abuse they have experienced. And Jones is remarkably forthcoming about the secrets of her own life. Some things are clearly too painful for her to analyze in detail, but can only be briefly narrated as events: her uncle's attempt at incestuous child abuse, a lover's physical assault. Reflection on why she does not want to discuss these events, the importance of maintaining some secrets, the distinction between secrecy and privacy, seem as vital to her story as the events on which she more fully reflects, because the why of secrets and silence is the important, but often missing link in women's lives.

Indeed, the why is key to understanding O'Donnell's murder...