NOTES FROM A CERTIFIED MADWOMAN
A Novel in Notes to Self
Notes From a Certified Madwoman is a raw, darkly funny work of autofiction about a daughter raised by a deeply traumatized mother whose love slowly becomes control.
It is amazing what an only child can experience behind closed doors while everyone outside the house knows an entirely different version of the person raising her.
Control rarely introduces itself as control.
Sometimes it is charming, helpful, funny, generous, even impressive, especially when there are witnesses. But behind closed doors, love can become conditional, concern can become surveillance, and protection can become possession.
A child can spend years learning that the safest version of reality is the one she keeps to herself.
When someone repeatedly tells you that you are too sensitive, dramatic, unstable, ungrateful, overreacting, crazy, or remembering it wrong, eventually a piece of paper can feel more trustworthy than another human being.
So she starts taking notes.
What happened.
What was said.
What she remembers.
What she knows.
Notes From a Certified Madwoman: A Novel in Notes to Self follows one woman as she begins separating mental illness from mistreatment, love from coercion, and her own voice from the voices that have defined her for decades.
What happens when the person who taught you how to survive becomes the person you have to survive?
Who told you that?
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I spent years trying to understand how a person can become extraordinarily capable while privately questioning her own perception of reality.
This story grew out of that question.
It is about what happens when love and control become difficult to separate. When the person who teaches you how to survive also teaches you to distrust yourself. When competence becomes armor. When everyone outside the house knows one version of a person while you know another.
And it is about what happens when the person who has been labeled difficult, dramatic, unstable, ungrateful, or crazy finally asks a different question:
Who told you that?
Autofiction gives me room to explore emotional truth without pretending memory is a surveillance camera.
Some details are reconstructed.
Some characters are composites.
Some moments are transformed.
But the questions underneath them are very real.
Sometimes the cycle begins to break when the scapegoat stops accepting everyone else’s version of reality and finally starts trusting her own answers.
Why this book exists
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Dedicated to Cletha. The wounds did not begin with me.