Proud Flesh: A Story of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Pleasure
264Proud Flesh: A Story of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Pleasure
264Paperback
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Overview
As seen in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity—a mother’s memoir of healing trauma, finding pleasure, and redefining the joys of her body
Proud Flesh is a gripping memoir—tender and fierce, incisive and whip-smart—that reckons with the questions what happens when survivors become mothers? and what if we give half the attention to understanding our pleasure as we have to our pain?
By the time Catherine Simone Gray was expecting her first child, she was ready to get a 4.0 in motherhood: the best baby books, the months of parenting classes, the loving, supportive partner—mother cum laude. But when she found herself struggling—to birth, to bond, to simply be with her son—she came up against a long-buried truth: the sexual violence and emotional abuse perpetrated against her in an earlier relationship created a wound that hadn’t really healed. It’s the kind of wound that society—and the cultural annals of mainstream motherhood—don’t prepare you for: the kind that makes itself known, on its own time, and demands to be seen before it can be tended.
Proud Flesh chronicles how birth and postpartum helped heal Gray from trauma, thrive in her marriage, and find surprise in the joy of her body. Told in two parallel narratives, Gray weaves her postpartum healing journey with the story of her young womanhood, sharing the arc of an abusive relationship and the healthy love she built in its aftermath.
A memoir of trauma, survivorship, brightness, and pleasure, Proud Flesh is a testament that we can pursue pleasure alongside our pain, build trust in our relationships, and learn to embrace our eroticism—and that motherhood can be an aid, rather than a hurdle, to this transformation.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9798889841265 |
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Publisher: | North Atlantic Books |
Publication date: | 02/25/2025 |
Pages: | 264 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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.