Couldn T Keep It To Myself Analysis

Summary Wally Lamb’s book Couldn’t Keep it to Myself is a book that tells the stories of 11 different women who were (are) incarcerated in the York correctional institution. These women who’s stories were told, were women who had committed all sorts of crimes, from embezzlement to homicide in the first degree. Their stories include stories of their lives before prison, how the got to prison, and their lives in prison. There were common factors in some of the stories of the women who ended up incarcerated. One factor that spoke out to me was that in most of their lives, they had a man harm them in some way or neglect them. Another common factor some stories had in common was that their parents or parent had issues with either mental health …show more content…
There was a pattern in Wally Lamb’s book Couldn’t keep it to Myself. This pattern was that most of these women had some kind of abuse done to them or to someone they loved by someone they knew. Specifically in the domestic violence cases it was their father or their husband who was beating them up or was beating up their mother. This is a huge issue is America and the Mallicoat book touches on children of intimate partner abuse. “Children are significantly affected by violence within the home environment, even if they are not the direct victims of the abuse” (Mallicoat, 137). Watching their parents argue and seeing their father hit their mother can have a huge impact on the child psychologically. Bonnie witnessed her mother being abused by her father who was a drunk and luckily they got a divorce, however this is not always the case. Bonnie was later verbally abused by her mothers boyfriend and he called her things like a “black whore” and a “no-good-whore” (Lamb, 201). In some cases, like Diane’s, people are abused by more than one person in their life. Diane was abused by bother her father and her husband. This abuse doesn’t only take a psychical toll on a person, but an emotional one as well. It is often hard for a women to leave her partner in that situation because there is a cycle that occurs and that cycle has what is called the “honeymoon phase” where the abusive partner feels bad about what they have done and tries to make up for it. The partner then forgives them and the cycle repeats itself all over again (Mallicoat, 135-136). My solution to this would be for women to be educated more on domestic/intimate partner abuse and know what to do and where to go when it starts happening. Another thing that would help this is if the children who witness the abuse can reach out to authorities and even maybe have a safe place they can go when the