What happens when survivors become mothers?

As seen in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity—a mother’s memoir of healing trauma, finding pleasure, and redefining the joys of her body

Proud Flesh is a gripping memoir—tender and fierce, incisive and whip-smart—that reckons with the questions what happens when survivors become mothers? and what if we give half the attention to understanding our pleasure as we have to our pain?

By the time Catherine Simone Gray was expecting her first child, she was ready to get a 4.0 in motherhood: the best baby books, the months of parenting classes, the loving, supportive partner—mother cum laude. But when she found herself struggling—to birth, to bond, to simply be with her son—she came up against a long-buried truth: the sexual violence and emotional abuse perpetrated against her in an earlier relationship created a wound that hadn’t really healed. It’s the kind of wound that society—and the cultural annals of mainstream motherhood—don’t prepare you for: the kind that makes itself known, on its own time, and demands to be seen before it can be tended.

Proud Flesh chronicles how birth and postpartum helped heal Gray from trauma, thrive in her marriage, and find surprise in the joy of her body. Told in two parallel narratives, Gray weaves her postpartum healing journey with the story of her young womanhood, sharing the arc of an abusive relationship and the healthy love she built in its aftermath.

A memoir of trauma, survivorship, brightness, and pleasure, Proud Flesh is a testament that we can pursue pleasure alongside our pain, build trust in our relationships, and learn to embrace our eroticism—and that motherhood can be an aid, rather than a hurdle, to this transformation.