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Marion Adler's avatar

You are just the best Mimi! What a great piece of writing! I felt like we were sitting in the same room - like the old days - yakking and puzzling away at these questions that just go on and on. The anxiety that we somehow deserve the misfortunes visited upon us - that we have erred in some unforgivable way - or even erred unknowingly - haunts us. I am guilty of occasionally engaging in that tendency to "blame the victim" - which, as we're spoken about - is actually an attempt to assure myself that it couldn't happen to me...

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Mimi Kramer's avatar

No, you are the best, Moll! You just fulfilled a fantasy I had that someone might respond and bring up "victim blaming," because I start doing that with Bundy, and I worry that it's not clear that this is all irrational and in any case just sort of thinking aloud and not meant to be expository prose. There *is* no end to the way way keep revising and revisiting our notions of the past and the problem is how to reclaim a sense of agency without engaging in something I'm not even sure there's a name for, because I'm not sure "self-victim-blaming" works!

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