When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife – Meena Kandasamy

And cut! I am the wife playing the role of an actress playing out the role of a dutiful wife watching my husband pretend to be the hero of the everyday. I play the role with flair.

The longer I stretch the act of the happily married couple, the more I dodge his anger. It’s not a test of talent alone. My life depends upon it.

When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife tells the story of a marriage between a university professor and a young, unnamed woman.

There are not many things a woman can become when she is a housewife in a strange town that does not speak any of her mother-tongues. Not when her life revolves around her husband. Not when she has been trapped for two months in the space of three rooms and a veranda.

The husband expects her to be perfect. To look and dress as he believes a wife should dress. To keep house and ensure that too is perfect. We soon learn, as the narrator did, that meeting his standards is impossible.

Initially the wife’s perceived failure results in the husband inflicting harm upon himself; he lights matches, extinguishing them on his own skin until she agrees to close her Facebook account.

When I am forced to leave Facebook, my final message is not: Trouble in Second Week of Marriage: Husband-Moron Insistent I Stay Isolated. Mr Control Freak Blackmailed Me Into Deactivating Account. Writer At Risk! SOS!

Instead my swansong is serious and formal; I write about the intertwining double helix of projects and looming deadlines. I compose the picture of being a busy woman, and maintain the act to precise proportions. I write out the formulaic pretence of living the writer’s life. No one gets a clue of how precariously alone I feel.

What follows is the inevitable descent into violence against the narrator.

One of the things that’s interesting about When I Hit You is that it’s a middle class university lecturer perpetrating acts of violence against a middle class, educated, woman. Kandasamy pushes against the idea that domestic violence is confined to a particular class or stereotype.

She also – as she did in The Gypsy Goddess – brings politics into the discussion. The narrator’s class and political leanings become another area for the Communist husband to berate her about. Here Kandasamy opens up a long overdue discussion about the misogyny of the far left which is utterly relevant to current society.

However, as the subtitle of the novel makes clear, this isn’t purely the story of a marriage steeped in fear, it is the story of a young woman becoming a writer. This is made clear from the beginning of the book with two framing devices; the first is the writer’s mother who, five years on, has claimed the story for herself. The narrator objects:

Much as I love my mother, authorship is a trait that I have come to take very seriously. It gets on my nerves when she steals the story of my life and builds her anecdotes around it. It’s plain plagiarism. It takes a lot of balls to do something like that – she’s stealing from a writer’s life – how often is that sort of atrocity even allowed to happen? The number one lesson I have learnt as a writer: Don’t let people remove you from your own story. Be ruthless, even if it is your own mother.

The second is when she reframes the story as though she is an actor playing the dutiful wife. While this could work to distance the reader, it actually provokes more empathy for the unnamed narrator; what is so bad that she has to pretend she is someone else to survive? As the novel progresses, however, it is the writing that the narrator does in secret that saves a part of herself.

When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife is a stunning piece of work. The writing is sharp, ratcheting the tension and horror at a steady pace until it is all-consuming. Kandasamy isn’t afraid to portray an intelligent woman being subjected to manipulation and violent acts. She isn’t afraid to question the portrayal of ‘upstanding’ men, the role of the political left and how a feminist can find herself in this situation. Kandasamy is an incredible talent and When I Hit You is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

I interviewed Meena Kandasamy about the novel; we discussed autofiction, politics and reframing women’s experiences.

You can buy When I Hit You from Amazon, Waterstones, or support your local independent bookshop.

You can also buy The Gypsy Goddess from Amazon, Waterstones, or support your local independent bookshop.
If, like me, there isn’t one near you, I recommend Big Green Bookshop.

Thanks to Atlantic Books for the review copy and to Kirsty Doole and Meena Kandasamy for the interview.