The Body Remembers: A Review of Jeannine Ouellette's The Part That Burns

Jeannine Ouellette is no stranger to pain and chronicles it most beautifully in her new memoir, giving name and form to the multi-faceted circumstances that have produced her exquisite trauma. The Part That Burns holds a light up to these events, crystallized over time, and marvels at the rainbow prism that radiates outward. While pain needn’t necessarily be productive, it is ever present; Ouellette demonstrates through strategic structures how her past trauma—and the generational traumas before her—live alongside her, shaping her choices throughout marriage and motherhood. And though healing might never be comprehensive, she demonstrates it can be clawed, bit by bit, out of life’s indifferent hands.

It is first obvious and required to say Ouellette’s imagery alone make this book worth an afternoon of careful contemplation. “A flat disc of moon hung like a nickel, slicing open black water with a sharp tunnel of light.” The colorful streaks of pool balls rolling down a sidewalk. Her father, not a swan: his bones “not hollow inside his flesh.” One might be tempted to think the beauty acts as a shield, softening the atrocities she chronicles in these aesthetic metaphors, bright details and a vibrant world both situating and de-centering the ugly. But another reading is this simply is Ouellette exulting, as any survivor might, in both the glory of the world around her and her ability to make it her own. A world that has given her a bad hand of cards is still home to pontoons on the lake, and Wyoming wildlife, and children.

Ouellette’s slim memoir recounts the events of her childhood and early marriage in conventional, standard prose, then returns to these stories in other chapters via series of vignettes, conversations with her daughter, and her ninth grade autobiography. Some are structured by different members of a similar theme: when organizing herself via various childhood dogs or songs that hit number one on the charts on their respective New Year’s Eves, she uses flesh and fur and Madonna to anchor us to her world. This cyclical structure echoes the cycles of generational trauma that flows from her grandmother to her own daughter but operates as a spiral, pulling us deeper into her understanding of the years of her life. She builds foundations of events in broad strokes, then returns later to sprinkle new detail, realized complexity, and a more full sense of self into the mix. How sobering, to read her molestation from her perspective as a four-year-old and then again as a mother, looking at her own toddler. We can collectively, but compassionately, wince at tenth-grade-Jeannine’s confidence at her Spanish abilities as she sets off to Mexico alone and at the calamities that ensue. Her own mother’s behavior often seems incomprehensible, until we learn her personal trauma includes being orphaned at seventeen, instantly losing two best friends (and, briefly, her ear) in a house explosion. Ouellette meticulously traces the ways our understanding of our pain grow and change when compounded and put into conversation with other experiences.

Some pages I wanted to cover my eyes and read between cracked fingers like one would stare at a smoldering car wreck—not to avoid them, but to shelter myself from the acute feelings she masterfully, and heartbreakingly, shares. Most jarring is her first postpartum sexual encounter, after giving birth to her daughter Sophie. We are transported to a hotel room: John, her first husband, has purchased crotchless lingerie for her, his parents are babysitting, and so deprived from six weeks of no sex, he is ready to “come like a freight train.” But between her cautioning him to be gentle and his first thrust, Ouellette sandwiches in the memory of her episiotomy. A doctor took a scalpel and cut “all the way through the thick, strong muscle of the vaginal wall,” rendering her unable to stand on her own for a week. (As someone who has never had a child, this alone is effective birth control.) Forty pages later, we’re back in the hotel room where Ouellette invites us to another turn of the screw. She tells us that she “slowly recalled,” when first looking at her body post-episiotomy, John had slid down the wall, paralyzed in ashen horror, staring at his young wife. She bloomed with a “swollen bruise the size of a grapefruit,” in so much pain she couldn’t breathe. John, we remember, had requested she keep the bodysuit on during sex: the crotch hole providing all necessary access, the black Lycra providing all necessary coverage. Ouellette ends the paragraph there. What else is left to be said?

During their marriage, Ouellette tells John of the various abuses she suffered at various hands over the years. He offers his pains and embarrassments in exchange: a bout of constipation, drinking as a teenager, and driving his former girlfriend to an abortion clinic. The juxtaposition feels intentional, with its chasm of magnitude so grotesque: John’s long-married, attentive, middle class parents shaped a stable childhood entirely unlike hers (which he unfairly wields against her in arguments that she does not defend). She could easily play the oppression Olympics, pitting circumstances against each other to crown herself the ultimate sufferer. And yet Ouellette is generally earnest and sympathetic about his problems: solemn that he did not go through with his first wedding, acknowledging his long commute, long work hours after fights. To readers more prone to anger, she displays remarkable empathy here. (Or, as someone who has never been married, perhaps this is what it takes to sustain decades of almost-love.)

And while it is true that one can be sympathetic to a spouse and still upset about her own problems, Ouellette savvily understands where actions speak louder than her beautiful words, both in her life and constructing her narratives. John’s frequent selfishness—displaying sorrow “for the pain of wanting and not getting,” his would-be affair, and neoliberal attitude towards sex—willing to go to a sex therapist, but says, “You’re frigid, and nothing will ever feel good to you,” when it isn’t working—builds the case for ending their marriage even before Ouellette guiltily admits to falling in love with someone else. As a child, when she tells her neighbors Mafia is killing her mom, they decline to help and retreat into their home. When she orchestrates a drive to Duluth and pleas for refuge for Rachael with her grandparents, they turn them away (Mafia is in legal trouble for abusing another young girl). What did speaking up do for her?

Pain and sorrow so frequently warp and deform their recipients, but for all her woes Ouellette is externally neither bitter nor resentful. Instead, she turns her attention inwards and fixates on her own brokenness. Ouellette is accustomed to suffering in silence, a practice learned from her mother who “closes the book” on the “particular sorrow” of her abuse. This silence is gendered, of course: it is almost redundant to explain the ways women are taught to be silent, about everything, especially for survival. This is why Ouellette curls her toes and bites her lip to avoid complaining during sex. Foreplay and her own pleasure, she tells her therapist, isn’t of interest. As a child, she is ‘grounded’ frequently and lives the life of a ghost, sleeping in the basement, making separate meals for herself. (And when she stays with a friend, her mother calls the police to forcibly retrieve her runaway daughter.) Most telling is in the basement of Trinity Lutheran. One member of the childhood sexual abuse support group is noticeably loud in discussion: she is moaning constantly, “a low, wet gurgle,” until tears spatter and stain her shirt. At the same time, Ouellette holds her breath to stop her body from vibrating, desperately focused on containing and suppressing her emotion. She hates this woman, she writes: “for being exactly like me—ruined—but letting it show.” She hates this woman for refusing to be silent.

Instead, Ouellette processes her world by escaping her own body, leaving the physical constraints of her circumstances. “I just pull myself through a doorway inside of me,” she explains after referencing her mother’s explosion, the tickle game with Mafia, and how jackalopes try to trick hunters to reach safety. She watches herself from above when she has sex with her first boyfriend; she dissociates: “my body is not me. I am connected to my body by a string.” Her mother takes long drives to nowhere, which Ouellette spends a chapter eulogizing: empty distance, barren country roads, the heft of the boat-like sedan encasing its inhabitants in safety. She eagerly searches for portals to another world in a canyon full of wildflowers. And she passes this practice to her daughter Lillian, who uses it after her own abuse. “My Self with a capital S—that’s what Mama says—would push against the boundaries of my skin,” the couch her boat, floating in the sea. Unanchored, unbothered.

Ouellette is keenly aware of the efforts healing requires to achieve only incomplete results, of the ways our bandages and scars layer on top of one another. From the way her new wedding ring, after replacing the engagement ring intended for the other Janine, catches on items around their home to how thick scar tissue finally replaces the pea-sized rock embedded in her knee, pain transmuted into new forms remains and adapts. She contemplates the metal pins in her mother’s shoulder. “Trauma is coded into our genes, mapped into our DNA,” she reads, to ask the question: can we eradicate our experiences? The ghosts of the past occupy the same physical space on our bodies and in our homes, lingering without a friendly neighborhood ghostbuster on the scene. Memories too are their own location that our minds visit, over and over, as she is plagued by thoughts of Mafia. Bravery, it would appear, is one solution; choosing love despite the circumstances. “Still, I had you,” she tenderly admits to Lillian. A decision once declined, now accepted. Despite the genetic propensity to inherit pain, abuse, fear. “Still, I have you.”

We receive an eponymous chapter in the middle of the book. “I am the part that burns,” Ouellette explains, as she tends to her fruitless garden; worries about toddler Sophie’s bad habits; confronts her mother about her childhood; remembers the explosive trauma her mother suffered; has her second child. She anxiously monitors all of her attempts at healing, knowing breaking the cycles requires growth, requires a venture into the unfamiliar. Repeated actions, her cycling through time, generate friction, fertile for a jumpstart. Her mother taps her cigarette before the explosion; she strikes a match on her marriage. “Fire starting is a felony, but workers need work,” she reasons. The burning, it seems, accompanies the healing; temperatures reaching a crescendo to melt and fuse broken pieces together. Cells and tendons knitting together to smooth over into a lumpy scar. Torn and whole, the body remembers. This memoir is her healing.