Skin Game a memoir
- New York St. Martin's Griffin 1999
- 178 S.
A memoir of self-mutilation by a woman who grew up cutting herself with razors in an attempt to relieve the depression and anxiety she felt. Kettlewell first learned that cutting herself with a razor blade gave her a feeling of calm when she was 12. An insecure child growing up in an uncommunicative family, plagued by ever-present anxiety, she derived comfort from making small, deliberate cuts on her upper arms, legs, ears, and anyplace else on her body that could be hidden from the eyes of teachers, friends, and parents. Self-mutilation took her from the hurricane of her life into its eye: All the chaos, the sound and fury, the uncertainty and confusion and despairall of it evaporated in an instant, and I was for that moment grounded, coherent, whole.'' To a certain extent, her story is fascinating. Since various forms of self-mutilation, like eating disorders, plague a distressingly large segment of the population, its at least sociologically relevant to read about one persons pathology. The shock of Kettlewells story is not the fact that she used to cut herselfin this talk-show culture readers are not so easily surprisedbut that she has chosen to tell her story at all, after successfully hiding her disorder for so many years. The same self-deprecation that caused the author to consider her depression out of proportion to her problems, combined, perhaps, with the urge to protect others who allowed her to keep her cutting secret, keeps her account oddly restrained, and sometimes gives it the flavor of a therapeutic exercise or a magazine article. When she writes that as a teenager she displayed a public self whose job it was to distract attention from any evidence of that other me, she seems unaware that the public self is still present in this book. Timely, and valuable for its insight into the cutters psyche, but with a remove that prohibits empathy.