Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence

Product Description

On an autumn afternoon, photographer Patricia Evans, out for a run on Chicago’s lake front, was attacked by a man who severely beat and sexually assaulted her. Her husband tells the story of a family shipwrecked in the midst of everyday life, trying to make sense of the violence that has entered their lives. This courageous and compelling account covers a period of five years, during which Evans remaps the world in light of the terrible knowledge inflicted on her and regains her place in it. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Amazon.com Review

Ostensibly, Jamie Kalven’s
Working with Available Light focuses on a single, life-altering event, but it’s primarily about a marriage. While running along Chicago’s lakefront area near their home in Hyde Park, Kalven’s wife, Patsy, was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted. Apart from the physical damage, which proved fleeting, the attack caused a lingering, often paralyzing sense of fear not only in Patsy but Kalven and their two young children, as well. This memoir covers the five years following the incident and the family’s efforts to deal with–and, if possible, learn from–the trauma. The fact that this survivor’s tale is written from the perspective of a loved one rather than the victim makes it a particularly interesting story. The experience forces Kalven to confront his own complex feelings of guilt, anger, and loss, as well as to analyze his entire relationship with Patsy. Admirably, Kalven acknowledges that his attempts to comprehend fully his wife’s experience will invariably fall short.
Working with Available Light is written in careful, elegant, and often poetic prose. It is also unflinchingly honest–almost to a fault. In sorting out his emotions on the page, Kalven exposes nearly every conceivable intimate aspect of their married life, and the effect of such a thorough cleansing is both tender and chilling. “Some experiences can’t be absorbed all at once; you must spend your life working to make them yours,” he writes. This book is only part of that process.

From Publishers Weekly

What distinguishes this harrowing memoir of the aftermath of rape is that it is written?and written beautifully?not by the victim but by her husband. During a midday lakefront jog in Chicago in 1988, photographer Patricia Evans, the author’s wife, was brutally beaten and raped. Her attacker was never caught. Kalven reports that Evans, like many rape victims, experienced a deep sense of powerlessness and disconnectedness. Struggling with overwhelming grief and suppressed rage, she saw a therapist, enrolled in a self-defense course, took sleeping pills and, with her husband’s help, analyzed her nightmares. Kalven writes movingly about all this and also about his own feelings of helplessness?especially his discomfort with his own physical strength and sexuality in the wake of the attack. He states that he set out to write this book in a way that would help his wife heal, and it certainly is an act of love?the culmination, apparently, of an arduous therapeutic process that severely tested their marriage. It is also an act of literature. Kalven broadens his cathartic memoir with reflections on the racial divide in America (his wife is white, her attacker black) and on how violence in its many forms shapes society. What is most impressive about this tender and candid book is the balance Kalven strikes between trying to comprehend his wife’s experience and knowing that, to some extent, her experience will be forever beyond his grasp. It is immensely touching to see this man feel and, very deliberately, write his way through his own pain and bewilderment into some still deeper knowledge, however filtered, of the woman he loves. (Mar.) FYI: See the review, below, of Patricia Weaver Francisco’s Telling, a memoir by a rape victim.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A memoir about the aftermath of violence