57 pages • 1 hour read
Madwoman
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Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation, mental illness, substance use, and sexual content.
After Clove’s father fell from the balcony, her mother screamed and sprinted down the 33 stories to his body. Instead of following her, Clove bought, with Christina’s help, a red-eye plane ticket to San Francisco as an unaccompanied minor. When she arrived in San Francisco, she went to an address that Christina had told her about, with only the $500 she’d taken from her mother when she fled and Celine’s documents. Christina had told her to take them and live her life under her daughter’s documentation. Clove asked for Velvet when she arrived. Velvet gave her a bed and helped her disguise herself. Other girls lived at the house, and Velvet specialized in helping them all disappear.
Living at Velvet’s, Clove participated in chores and stole food from dumpsters to survive. Velvet kept food in the house, but Clove didn’t want to take it out of fear of someone beating her, as her father would have done. After six months of living at Velvet’s, Clove received a letter from Christina informing her of Celine’s death from her immune disorder and her impending death by suicide. By this time, Clove’s mother received a life sentence for first-degree murder. Velvet supplied Clove with drugs to get her through this difficult period and told her that she would help her find a job.
Chapter 8 Summary
Two weeks have passed since Clove’s mother’s letter arrived. Clove is having a difficult time with Nova, and her husband recommends that they send her to camp. However, Clove’s anxiety and paranoia won’t allow her to release Nova to the care of strangers like that. Paranoid that her mother might send the next letter from prison to her house instead of to her PO box, Clove bribes her mailwoman to place any letters from prison aside for her in a special container so that her husband or children won’t discover them. The mailwoman shuffles through her letters and hands Clove the letter from her mother’s facility, as it arrived that very same day.
Clove rushes upstairs to read the letter. The letter is from a prisoner named Selby McGee, who claims that she is a cellmate of Clove’s mother. Most of the letter castigates Clove for letting her mother think she’s dead and entreating her to come and visit. Clove puts the letter away and thinks about her next steps, which she’s not looking forward to.
Chapter 9 Summary
After telling Clove that she needed to get a job, Velvet took her shopping at local thrift stores for a new dress. Clove picked out a new dress, which ended up being a perfect fit. Velvet gave Clove salient advice about making sure that she wasn’t reliant on other people. She told her that she’d give her help one time but never again.
Afterward, Velvet took Clove to a grocery store and convinced the manager to hire Clove temporarily as an employee in the butcher department. Clove started her work. One day, she noticed the manager talking to a pretty woman with hoop earrings, and she felt a surge of rage from a source she couldn’t identify. When she told Velvet about this feeling, Velvet told her that it was a feeling of inferiority she learned from her mother. Though her father had preyed upon this feeling, he hadn’t created it within her. Velvet claimed that it was probably passed down from mother to daughter within Clove’s family. Though this statement angered her, Clove realized the truth that was most likely at the heart of it.
Clove and the butcher became closer and closer, until eventually, Clove could tell that the butcher was growing feelings for her. One day, she sat him down and told him that once she turned 18, she’d have no place to live. The butcher responded that he might be able to help with that problem, as he had some space at his current residence.
That night, the butcher and Clove got pizza, and she tearfully told him the broad strokes about her past, her mother, and her father. The butcher then took her home to her apartment. Clove tried to kiss him there that first night, but he stopped her and told her that he wanted to wait until she turned 18. They began to live together, and they fell in love. When Clove turned 18, they had sex. The butcher guided her slowly and carefully.
After nearly a year of living together, Clove still felt suspicious that the butcher might one day become abusive like her father. However, he showed no signs of turning in that direction, and slowly, Clove started to believe that true, respectful love was possible. However, Clove also knew that the butcher pitied her and thought of her as the poor orphan who he saved. Clove began to resent that pity, not wanting people to always see her as the product of her childhood. Clove also became interested in a more secure, upscale life. She started to learn about supplements and clean living and developed an expensive taste in brands.
In secret, Clove began to start the process of applying for college. She passed the GED and researched community colleges, eventually deciding on a university in Oregon that she would attend. She realized that she wanted to break up with the butcher, as dating him would only continually remind her of her childhood. Instead, Clove realized that she needed to permanently sever all ties with anyone who knew even the slightest detail of her true past. Eventually, she fled from the butcher, taking all her possessions and disappearing without a word, just as she’d done to her mother.
Chapter 10 Summary
Despite her intense curiosity, Clove never looked up the butcher on social media to see how he was doing. In the narrative present, with the letter from her mother destroying all her old boundaries, Clove gives in and looks up the butcher online. He seems to be doing well from his photos, with a young daughter in tow.
Clove also suspects that the butcher is the person who revealed her existence to her mother and the lawyer, as he was the only person she’d ever been honest with regarding her past. She writes an email to the butcher confronting him and asking him to tell her if he was the one who contacted her mother.
Chapter 11 Summary
One day, when Nova was a newborn, Clove’s husband watched a television show that reenacted old crimes and saw the scene of Clove’s mother shoving her father over the balcony railing. A picture of the three of them flashed on the screen, and Clove wondered whether her husband would recognize her in her childhood. To head off any questions, Clove shoved Nova into her husband’s lap as a distraction. Though he didn’t confront her, Clove still worried that he might be suspicious of the truth.
In the present, Clove checks her phone and sees that the butcher read her message, but he hasn’t responded yet. In her anxiety, Clove drives to the store to stock up on supplements, which often help her calm down. While there, she runs into the woman whose car she hit earlier. Clove feels a strange connection with the woman, and as they converse, she considers whether to ask the woman to quit her job at the grocery store and come work for her as a nanny. Unable to ask the woman, Clove instead speculates about getting a job at the grocery store, which the woman, whose name is Jane, reacts to with incredulity. On her way out of the store, Clove asks the woman at the front register for a job application.
In her car, Clove reads the response from the butcher. He tells her that he’s thought about her every day since she left and that there are things that they need to discuss in person. Clove feels apprehensive, not knowing what he possibly might want to express to her.
Chapter 12 Summary
Clove’s husband’s mother, who Clove and the kids refer to as Tootsie, arrives at the house to help out. Clove imagines that her mother-in-law, the sort of woman who wears an American flag pin everywhere she goes, is judging her for the state of her house and her children’s behavior. Early in her relationship with her husband, Clove and Tootsie were close, but the relationship soured as time went on. Clove realized that Tootsie would never replace the mother she’d lost.
Clove stares angrily at her husband, who had invited Tootsie over as a surprise to help with childcare. Clove and her husband start to argue. Clove argues that his mother has never been interested in helping, and her husband says that Clove’s irrationally rejects help when she needs it. As they argue, Clove has flashbacks to the abusive arguments that her father had with her mother. Worried that her intense emotions might turn her into her father, Clove gives in and allows Tootsie to stay and help with the children.
Chapters 7-12 Analysis
In these chapters, the novel develops complex ideas around identity formation, female solidarity networks, and how trauma shapes memory and relationship patterns. Documentation and identity papers become significant elements in the central sections of the novel, particularly through Celine’s documents, which Clove adopted to create her new identity in California. These papers become both literal and metaphorical vehicles of transformation, representing how one can construct and reconstruct identity as a survival mechanism.
Bieker continues to develop Intergenerational Patterns of Female Survival through the introduction of an underground network of women helping other women escape abuse. Characters like Christina and Velvet represent different approaches to aid and survival. Christina facilitated the protagonist’s escape through conventional means (plane tickets and documentation), while Velvet offered a more radical form of assistance through complete identity erasure. However, these roles and their comparative levels of radicalness shift throughout the narrative, as Christina’s motivations and actions seem increasingly malicious as the author reveals additional information about her parenting practices toward Celine.
In these chapters, economic class and compulsive consumerism also play a role in identity transformation and attempts for control. In doing so, the author further asserts the role of The Commodification of Safety within the narrative. The protagonist’s evolution from dumpster diving at Velvet’s house to obsessing over supplements and expensive brands represents both an attempt to distance herself from her past and a form of compensatory behavior for childhood deprivation. Bieker also emphasizes this transformation through physical spaces, with each new living arrangement being fancier and more expensive than the last. These mark stages in Clove’s identity development as she increasingly distanced herself from her past. Velvet’s house functioned as a liminal space between Clove’s past and future selves. The grocery store Earthside, on the other hand, becomes a site of both potential regression and redemption through her interaction with Jane, as Clove vacillates between these two possibilities. These spaces demonstrate the tension between the various aspects of Clove’s life. She tries to maintain distinctions between each of the spaces, as each has its own set of challenges for her to navigate. This habit reflects a childhood in which Clove was taught to hide the abuse occurring in her family home. As a result, physical spaces serve as a way of protecting herself from the messiness and chaos that would occur if the spaces started to intermingle with each other.
These chapters develop and deepen the characterizations of the two significant romantic relationships in Clove’s life: the butcher and her husband. The butcher represents a possibility of genuine connection and healing, characterized by patience and respect. In contrast, she chose her husband specifically for his lack of curiosity and predictability. However, Bieker also portrays the butcher as self-involved and too pitying for Clove’s needs at the time. Clove’s eventual fleeing from the butcher—without so much as a note or a letter—mimics how she was forced to flee both her abusive father and the consequences of her role in his death. This also shows how Clove’s anxieties can overpower her concern for the people she loves in her life.
In these chapters, the author portrays maternal relationships through multiple lenses, showcasing the complexity with which the author is approaching her protagonist’s relationships. Clove’s relationship with her mother-in-law, Tootsie, serves as a foil to her relationship with her biological mother. Tootsie succeeds in the ways that Clove’s mother failed, and vice versa. Her strained relationship with Tootsie demonstrates how maternal protection can also be isolating, a tactic that her mother also experienced while navigating her father’s abuse.
As Clove learned what she needed to survive in a world without parental support, her financial independence emerged as a source of conflict and tension. Her transition from dependent teenager to college applicant represents both an attempt at self-determination and a rejection of the perceived victim narrative that the butcher’s pity imposed upon her. Additionally, the novel’s structure mirrors Clove’s psychological processes. Memory intrusions and temporal shifts reflect how The Struggle for Personal Identity Amid Trauma disrupts her perception of linear experience. This demonstrates the impossibility of completely escaping one’s history despite elaborate attempts at reinvention, including false identities.
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