Domestic abuse and violent marriages are unfortunately more common than people think. Karen Palmer went beyond what most women do to get out of that situation, running away and changing her identity in order to find safety. In her memoir She’s Under Here, Palmer depicts the “DIY witness protection” she devised to escape her dangerous ex and its consequences.
In 1989, terrorized by Gil, her erratic, gun-toting first husband, Palmer and her second husband quit their jobs, bought a used car with cash, and packed it full of personal belongings and their entire savings. With her two young daughters buckled in the backseat, they left California for Colorado to begin a new life with false identities.
This candid and poignant account explores Palmer’s youthful attraction to Gil, the unraveling of their relationship due to his abuse, and her mounting fear for her and her daughters’ safety, followed by the anxious realities of life in hiding. With deep empathy and ruthless intelligence, Palmer interrogates her guilt, her duty, her desires, and her right to a life unencumbered by terror. Her memoir neither absolves nor justifies, instead exposing the difficult choices women—especially mothers—are often forced to make.
Karen Palmer is a Pushcart Prize winner and the author of the novels All Saints (Soho Press, 1997) and Border Dogs (Soho Press, 2002). A native of Los Angeles, she currently teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver and lives with her husband in California.
I spoke with Palmer over Zoom about She’s Under Here and its complicated themes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: Throughout the book, you seesaw between guilt and the need for safety and happiness. There’s a fascinating moral complexity at play. Has writing the book brought you clarity?
Karen Palmer: Yes, it did. It was all bottled up inside for such a long time, and the desire to get it down on paper was overwhelming. Early versions of the book were just kind of spewing out the stuff that had happened, and that, while harrowing and perhaps interesting, wasn’t really a complete story. So I had to think an awful lot, once I had the actual events down. You don’t have a real story until you start addressing, “What is my part in it?” I did feel guilty for an awfully long time, and it really was only through completing the book that I had a chance to look at things as clearly as I can [and] also acknowledge that on some level, it’s never resolved. I will never not feel guilty, but I feel better, and I feel more secure in the idea that I did what I had to do, and there is no reason to beat myself up over that anymore.
Rumpus: I think there’s so much hidden abuse and coercion of women, especially mothers, to stay in marriages. Children are often used as the hook to keep the woman tethered, but in your case, they were the catalyst to leave—even disappear.
Palmer: [My ex kidnapped our daughter] and he told me that he would do it again. And I had absolutely no doubt that he would do it, and this time he wouldn’t give her back. That was the trigger for leaving and, of course, seeing [his] gun and realizing that this was never going to be over. I wanted to have a normal divorce. I wanted him to be a divorced father who could see his children. I wasn’t interested in keeping the children away from him, but he wouldn’t allow that to happen unless I did what he wanted. So, you know, that was the line. If he hadn’t taken Amy, I wouldn’t have stayed with him. I would have still left [him], but I probably would not have run. I probably would have battled it out in court and done the thing that women have to do. Something that really drives me crazy is the courts who will take an abusive man and say, “Well, he has his beef with the child’s mother, but he’s still a good father. He loves his children.” And it feels to me that, by definition, if you do this to the mother, you are not a good father.
Rumpus: I agree. Abuse of the mother is child abuse. From personal experience, I can confirm it’s deeply traumatic to witness your parent being mistreated.
Palmer: Yeah. The fact that he wasn’t slapping them around or anything was irrelevant, because he was making an environment for them that was filled with danger and hatred.
Rumpus: In your memoir, you beautifully write the ways in which victims rationalize staying with their abuser or returning. That self-doubt is so complicated and, I think, part of why women are too often dismissed when they finally try to report abuse or seek justice. It’s that perennial twisted question: “Why did you stay?”
Palmer: [I stayed for so long] because I didn’t know anyone who had been abused. That doesn’t mean they weren’t out there among people I knew, but I didn’t know about it. I had never been to a shelter. I didn’t know anyone who was in this situation, so I had nobody to talk to. And I was gaslit so much. [Gil and I] would have some kind of terrible incident like the gun [he shot] in the sink. And I’m out there on the couch thinking, “I have to leave—I have to leave—I have to leave.” And then I get up in the morning, and he’s in the kitchen cooking breakfast, and everything is completely normal, and he’s talking to the kids and being a wonderful father. And I’m looking at this tableau and thinking, “Oh my god, this is my family. This is my beloved family. I must have exaggerated in my own mind; I made it worse than it was.” And of course, there was the hole in the sink, but then he plastered it over. That was such a perfect metaphor for everything that happened in the marriage: you have this explosion, and then somebody very carefully covers it over and you don’t see it anymore—but it’s there.
Rumpus: I think we are so propagandized in our culture to honor the nuclear family and patriarchal values. There’s immense pressure to follow the rules, so we hide things and bend over backwards to keep the family together.
Palmer: Don’t break up the family.
Rumpus: Because if you do, even if you are justified, you’re the bad guy.
Palmer: When I left him, I was definitely the bad guy [for some of our friends], because he was out in the world, very charismatic. He made friends easily. He was an entertaining guy until he lost his mind and then other people saw how dangerous he was, but until that moment, they thought that I was the bad guy in the story. And it’s not that I was guilt-free—I most certainly was not—but I was not the bad guy. Of course, I kept a lot of it secret. Until I actually left him, I didn’t really tell my mother [what was happening], because I was very invested in having made a good choice in marrying him and proving to my mother that the marriage was fine. She was very ambivalent about him, and as time went on, disliked him more and more, and I would defend him, and I would listen to myself defending him, and think, “What are you doing? This is crazy.” And yet, and yet.
Rumpus: There’s so much shame in being abused, and I think a lot of people who are in that situation cover it up. They convince themselves it’s not that bad or else that others won’t think it’s “bad enough.”
Palmer: That’s like the situation I [write about,] with my divorce attorney. After my ex had gone to visit him, he’s like, “Oh, [Gil] is a great guy. He’ll get over it.” And I told the attorney about that incident where he headbutted me, and the attorney is like, “Well, did you go to the emergency room? Did you take pictures of bruises?” It felt like my air was all gone. This person wants me [dead], and then to have my own attorney say to me, “It’s fine”? I thought, having moved ninety miles away and started the divorce [proceedings], it was going to be bumpy for a while, but we’d get through it. [But] the opposite happened. If you have recently left someone, that is the single most dangerous time for a woman, because you have the audacity to go.
Rumpus: Yes, that narcissist rage: How dare you reject me? Not to armchair-diagnose anyone here, but there’s something to be said about narcissistic/sociopathic personalities and their charisma and capacity for love-bombing. Their ability to make you feel like you’re the center of the world for a moment—that becomes almost addictive, right? When you’ve had this traumatic and deeply lonely thing happen to you, as you did with a teenage pregnancy and giving your baby up, being seen in that way must have felt like Gil was filling such a gap.
Palmer: Yes, absolutely. In some ways, the reaction from most people I’ve spoken to is, “Well, what were you doing with a person like that?” It’s related to, “Why did you stay so long?” Because it’s very easy to fall in love with a person like that! And I fell very hard, and I was very young, and I imprinted on him. When I look back on it now, what he was doing—which we would never have determined it this way, because it was the seventies—but what he was doing was grooming me.
Rumpus: This pathology seems to prey on vulnerability as well as on empathy, and the fact that the human beings for whom you would have the deepest love and empathy were your children—there’s such cruelty, but also effectiveness, in preying on that.
Palmer: It’s like they’re brilliant in this very particular way. Once you start examining it, you almost can’t believe it. We think nobody can be that calculated. But I think it’s instinctive, rather than calculated.
Rumpus: Speaking of mental illness and domestic abuse, your memoir very clearly illustrates the dangers of gun ownership in that context. Gil’s gun seemed to be instrumental to your fear and your decision to disappear. And it sort of begs the question, how different would your story have unfolded if he didn’t have a gun?
Palmer: The gun was absolutely instrumental. And part of the reason why is that he told me, more than once, that he had gotten rid of it—and he was just hiding it. In the book, there’s a long chapter that covers the fourteen years of the relationship and towards the end I talk about, can you know someone by what they love, and can you also know [them] by what they hide? And [with Gil], I felt the shape of something, but I didn’t know what it was, and that something was the gun. He’d bought it off somebody, so he wouldn’t have shown up in any database as owning a gun. It’s such a terrible, intransigent problem. I don’t see how it’s ever going to be solved, because there are so many guns out there, and even if they decided to confiscate them all tomorrow, they absolutely couldn’t. Our culture is so violent. And in times past, if a husband killed his wife, a lot of times, he would get off on the charge, because it was a “crime of passion.”
Rumpus: But a woman kills her rapist and gets twenty-to-life in prison.
Palmer: The misogyny is just so soaked into our culture that women are not equal human beings, [but] that’s a whole other conversation!
Rumpus: I noticed layers of estrangement throughout your story, from your biological mother and biological son, obviously, but there’s also this emotional estrangement that takes root between you and your parents when they force you to give up your baby. How do you think these layers of estrangement affected your ability to conceive of disappearing as an option?
Palmer: It made it easier. It was like Gil burning [my] photographs. It’s like he erased my history, so finishing the job was easier. Being estranged from my parents showed me that you can survive without those connections. You may be poorer for it, but you can survive it. I feel very badly about my parents. I was so angry at [my father] all through my childhood that I made no effort to know him, and then he died when I was nineteen, and that was the end of it. With my mother I was close on and off, and she was such a difficult woman—so judgmental and domineering—that I felt cowed by her for so many years. I think if only I had not been cowed by her, that we could have had a completely different kind of relationship. It was just like with Gil. I would just go along to get along. And if I had stood up to her, I think she would have respected that, because she was not a bad person. One of the reasons our relationship survived all these things was because I always knew that she loved me. She was difficult, but I did not feel unloved.
Rumpus: You hit the nail right on the head. I think that’s the key difference between those who find relief in no-contact estrangement, and those for whom it’s not the answer. It’s about whether you feel that love.
Palmer: To come to the conclusion that a parent doesn’t love you. Oh my god, how crushing.
Rumpus: Definitely. Let’s shift gears and talk craft a little. You’ve written two novels previously. Can you tell me about the differences you encountered between the genres?
Palmer: The thing about writing a memoir is, if you write yourself into a corner, you can only get out by telling the truth. Making something up to bridge a problem area is not available to you. With a novel, you can take many wrong turns in the middle of composition, and you can go back and say, “Oh, maybe her love affair shouldn’t be with her dentist, [it] should be with the housewife next door.” And that will maybe solve your plot problem. [In memoir], you’re just bound by the truth, and there’s no getting around it. […] I tried a couple of times, when I was still very fearful of my ex-husband, to write the story as a novel and I could never get it to work, because I was trying to disguise things. And at a certain point, after some years passed, when I felt considerably safer, I felt like I could tell the story the way it needed to be told, which was true and straight.
Rumpus: What was your favorite part about writing this book?
Palmer: Oh, god, none of it. (laughs) No, my favorite part was finishing it! But I did like solving problems. I had a problem [with] that chapter that covers the fourteen years [of the relationship]. Originally I wasn’t going to talk about it at all. I was just going to jump in to where the hairy part of the story starts. And then I realized, without the context of the relationship, it wouldn’t mean anything. But how do you cover ordinary life where [complete normalcy alternates with] chaos and fear, over this long relationship? I liked solving that problem. It felt very satisfying.
Rumpus: Memoir writing is notoriously difficult. Was any aspect of it particularly challenging?
Palmer: The expected answer is reliving things like the kidnapping and giving the baby up, and this is where being a novelist was useful to me. I was able to think of myself like a character in a novel, and I could write about what happened to that girl. The hard part of the book for me was the second half, where I start addressing the consequences of having [disappeared]. I thought I didn’t have a story: we got away and eventually everything was fine, with some bumps in the road. And then I realized that the second half was actually as much, if not more important than the first part of the book. It’s the way to make meaning out of what had happened to me.
Rumpus: Your second half is quite powerful, so it’s fascinating that that wasn’t planned at first! I’m curious about how you plotted, beyond events and consequences. The memoir sort of reads like a thriller. Do you have any tips for writers who may seek to tighten the pace or increase the suspense in their memoir?
Palmer: I really wanted to write a short book, and I had a lot to say, so I needed to be very tight about what happened. Originally, it was told very much out of order, and I desperately wanted to write something that was more fragmented and more associational, which would not have been thriller-ish. [But] at some point it seemed that in writing it that way, the moments that were super important had no context, [and the reader] needed to know the things that happened before in order to get why I was flipped out about this, that, or the other thing. So I was kind of forced into writing it chronologically, which was not my plan, and then, once I made that decision, it made sense to do it that way!
