If I am Missing or Dead

Orginally published in Ins & Outs.

By Janine Latus | Simon & Schuster 2008 | $15.00 | 336 pages

“I didn't want to do it, but you made me," Janine Latus’s boyfriend says after brutally beating her on a ski vacation. These ten simple words are practically synonymous with abusive relationships. It is a verbal trap so common that it borders on clichéd, yet it is one of the most distilled expressions of the perverse logic that drives abuse: the aggressor’s desire for absolution from blame and the victim’s search for whatever misdeed could make their loved one so cruel to them. Journalist Janine Latus skillfully explores the rhetoric of abuse in loose, lean prose in her gripping memoir, If I Am Missing or Dead. The book tells the story of Latus and her younger sister Amy, both charming, bright women who continuously choose domineering, abusive partners. Latus finally leaves her husband in the spring of 2002 after over a decade of marriage. Amy isn’t so lucky. Years after successfully leaving one abusive marriage, she is murdered by her boyfriend, a con artist rodeo cowboy named Ron Ball.
Despite the heart wrenching nature of her story, Latus doesn’t leave room for self-pity or florid depictions of abuse and redemption, no small feat considering that these stylistic flourishes are staples of the genre. Instead, she adroitly mines her history of abuse to expose the roots of her cycle of violence in a sensitive, non-sensational manner. Growing up in the pre-feminist Midwest, Latus is saddled with an imperious, lewd father who belittles his children, and she is subject to myriad unwelcome advances by older men. The narrative arc is structured like an abusive relationship itself; her father’s lecherousness and husband’s control issues are introduced into the narrative with little fanfare. Fleeting details are dropped like a warning sign that could be easily overlooked, like her father’s hand grazing her leg for a fraction of a second too long or the daily “weigh in” with her husband, until they spiral out of control pages hence, and her father is sidling up to one of her friends trying to cop a feel or her husband is monitoring her clothing and Body Mass Index. How one chooses to internalize power or perceived lack of it lies at the heart of this unflinching, evocative story that evokes the claustrophobia of infinitely regressive abusive relationships. It reminds its readers that all victims of abuse have agency, without succumbing to the moralization of a cautionary tale.

By JESI KHADIVI