In movies, revealing a family secret usually ends the story. Audiences like a happily-ever-after: the wound is lanced and drained, justice smites the offender, and the victim goes forward with head held high. This memoir shows the opposite. Opening the wound is an immense shock emotionally, physically, socially, and legally. Draining it takes years. In The Unravelling, author Donna Besel gives us an unstinting, almost seismographically detailed look at those shockwaves spreading through her inner self, her family, and her community.

Going into the book, I worried that reading Besel’s abusive family dynamic would be triggering, but the abuse details were sparse and non-graphic, their impact building in the grey spaces between the words. I expected the emotional struggle of healing, having lived the 1990s attending very similar women’s groups, where we didn’t yet know that bearing witness to others’ traumas could re-traumatize us. Even had we known, where else could we go but to each other? For most of us, as for Besel, therapy was expensive and hard to access, especially for rural women. We faced resistance if we spent time—let alone money—on healing ourselves.

Healing is exhausting. We fit it in around childcare and cooking, housework and community obligations. Besel’s healing unfolds in wild emotions and deep fatigue. She curses and weeps as she learns to reach her own body, her own mind, and her own feelings buried under decades of abuse, shame, and self-preservation. Emotionally, she feels a tornado of guilt for siblings who had it worse and anger at those who suffered less. She also feels guilt for healing while her siblings still struggle, as well as abiding rage toward the parent who didn’t protect her. But where is one supposed to put that anger if that parent died, directly or indirectly, at the abuser’s hands? Yet Besel persists, driven by the conviction that anywhere, emotionally speaking, must be better than here.

Filing charges offers no remedy for Besel’s emotional distress. The author’s clear, unsparing prose takes us with her through every exhausted, reluctant, and so rarely exultant step in the legal marathon. This unwieldy, male-dominated, bureaucratic process—too little changed from the 1990s—is the nightmare that keeps many survivors from reporting sexual abuse even in this #MeToo era. It’s further complicated by family and community members, and possible witnesses against the abuser who feel compelled to protect their own current relationships and community ties, rather than vindicate the survivors’ testimonies over the past.

Besel’s story didn’t happen in rural southern Saskatchewan, where I lived in the 1990s, but I too met abusive men surrounded by enablers who minimized abuses and maintained silence. The survivors grew up unheard and unprotected, thickening their shells and papering over their memories to avoid being re-traumatized every time they passed their abuser or his protectors. Every word in this book is not only Besel’s intimate history but a call to all those who still live under the silence: it won’t be easy, it won’t be pretty, it will be exhausting, but speaking your truth, even to one other person, can take you to somewhere better than where you are now.

Novelist J.E. Barnard writes about women reclaiming their power. The Falls Mysteries (Dundurn Press) explores healing from intimate partner violence and workplace PTSD, walking a parent through MAID (medical assistance in dying), managing chronic disabling illness, and supportive friendships that buffer women against a harsh world. Her 1992 short film, 'Daddy is not like Grandpa,' looks at the intergenerational effects of intimate partner violence.