Wounding by Heidi James

by Heidi James

Cora has everything a woman is supposed to want - a career, a caring husband, children, and a stylish home. Desperate for release and burdened with guilt she falls into a pattern of ever increasing violence and sexual degradation till a one night stand tips her over the edge. Wounding explores a woman's search for redemption, identity and truth.

Paperback

First published April 24, 2014

About the author

Heidi James was born in Chatham, Kent. (also home to Billy Childish and Charles Dickens) She has a PhD in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing.

Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Somesuch Stories, Dazed and Confused, Flux, Galley Beggars and Mslexia, as well as in the anthologies The Loose Cannon, Writing from the Edge and Turpin’s Cave.

Her novella The Mesmerist's Daughter (published by Neon Press in April 2015) won the 2015 Saboteur Award for Best Novella and she was a finalist for the Cinnamon Poetry Collection Prize. She was awarded the Sophie Warne Fellowship in 2008.

She lives in London with her family, including two rescue dogs, Rose and Jay.

Reviews

[Lisa - OwlBeSatReading 🦉📚 · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘I’m getting old and bitter. Soon I won’t recognise myself’.

Are you a woman of a certain age?

Have you lost your identity?

Are you really only known as so-and-so’s wife or what’s-his-faces’ mother?

Look, do you want to just juice up your tedious existence and do some crazy shit to remind yourself that you do actually have a pulse?!

It’s all very well isn’t it when everyone else thinks they know who you are, but in fact, you’re desperate to feel something. Anything.

Oh yeah, what was I doing? Got sidetracked....

Anyway ladies, READ THIS BOOK. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to a bit of self-clarity without getting into trouble.

And gents, married gents, new Fathers, READ THIS BOOK TOO. It might give you an insight as to why us women are so complicated and sometimes unreachable.

[Αλέξανδρος · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book with two sides. The husband's and his wife. However, the wife is the real protagonist. She is the one in action.

Despite its small size (170 pages) it's not something that you should devour in one night. The first part of the book feels slower, because I was getting to knowing these two people. Each word had a meaning, it was important, because it put me in Cora's state of mind. And soon it would get darker and darker. A labyrinth that I didn't know how they would escape from it. At points least expected it scared me. People showing their bad sides, expressing in actions what we may be thinking. A woman not coping with all the roles that she was assigned to by nature and society and a good husband with self doubts not able to express them. All heading to a climax in the last 60 pages that made me chew my nails.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Squirm in your seat - take a good look at yourself stuff.
Beautifully written and intriguing account of the sometimes dark side of motherhood.

[Lynn Michell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cora, once original, free and bold, has been eroded and erased by motherhood. Numb as a stone, she moves through her routines and duties, wearing her masks so as not to offend and to keep up the pretence that she is still alive. But the gulf between the emptiness inside and the normality she must show reach the point where only the pain of self-harm can reassure her that she still exists. Written in two voices, this is a brave, engrossing novel in that it dares to tell taboo truths about motherhood and its aftermath. Cora’s voice is breathless, tilting towards insanity. Her husband’s voice is calm, reasonable, puzzled, tolerant as he asks himself where he has gone wrong, what he has done wrong since their days of heady young love, questions he is unable to express or discuss out loud. Cora’s retreat into pain is entirely credible. The book rushes headlong towards an excruciating, nail-biting but inevitable ending.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a raw and unsettling read. I have read quite a few of books over the last few years about women struggling with the elimination of their sense of individuality or self and most of them have had the similar sense of being in a fever dream. They haven often been poetic, with a heavy use of metaphor and/allusion and as a result (purposely I am assuming) obtuse and confusing. There is nothing wrong with that but in contrast this is completely different. It’s beautifully written, but the language is more direct. Nothing is dressed up. You can recognise the job that Cora does and the relationships that she has and easily follow the inevitable (?) progression of her thoughts. You even have the alternating viewpint of her loving but completely oblivious husband and these combined made it more real and hence more disturbing to me.

This was a good debut, an unflinching look at the potential loneliness of motherhood and marriage (however seemingly perfect) and I’m really interested in seeing how James’s later books have developed.

[Nina-Marie Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was gorgeous book by one of my favourite authors. It still haunts me. Her descriptions of the loneliness and desolation one can feel in a relationship - and the pain, oh the pain... I so admire how she writes seamlessly from the male to the female perspective. This is a powerful, sublime novel.

[D.E. Oprava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduced it to my university students, they loved it. Makes you feel, pan-generational, real.

[Ellie Hawkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m probably starting to be a bore about the beauty of James’ prose, but I am not going to apologise! Wounding is such a complex, detailed, finely-drawn depiction of what it means to fall into society’s expectations, to find yourself living a life that bears no relation to your inner truth. The structure, alternating between Cora’s third person point of view and the increasingly frustrated and desperate first person addresses of her husband, shows the widening gap between them and emphasises just how alone Cora is in her feelings.

I found Cora’s journey subtler than the blurb suggests – rather than a dramatic fall into a life of degradation, what Wounding represented to me was a bold exploration of a woman trying to find the core (oh, is there a pun there?! Sorry!) of herself in a world which probably doesn’t want her find it. It is thought-provoking and occasionally piercingly close to the bone (I have to state for the record that I love being a mother, but when I read works like this, or Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, for example, I feel a drop in my stomach at how unexamined my decision to have children was, how the assumption of it took precedence over any real soul-searching about whether it was right for me. It is, by the way, but that shouldn’t be a given). This topic is so important, and I think Wounding adds a really brave voice to the conversation.

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

A working mother who has had all she can stand. Although written from both the husband's and wife's viewpoint, the wife's view drew me in. I found her painful maternal feelings to be authentic and understandable, and wondered how she would resolve them. Surprising, unexpected ending.

Suffolk library

[Mayfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have become a bonafide Heidi James fan. She writes honestly and clearly about relationships, parenthood, and the narratives we live, with no schmaltz or saccharine. I read her, and see my own life in a new light.

[Mrs KBB · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can really appreciate what this book is trying to do. It highlights that what we perceive, even in our most intimate relationships, can be very far from the truth, that people can have dark, troubling thoughts, needs & be so very misunderstood. But I can’t say i enjoyed the book.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic writing. This will stick with me for a long time.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most unsettling books I've ever read. It'll stay with me for quite some time.

This is my first Heidi James novel, but it won't be my last.

[Lady R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw, unflinching & beautiful. A devastating and often uncomfortable yet gripping read into the realities of motherhood and marriage.

[Steve Clough · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exquisite study of identity, modern relationships and loneliness. The flawed central characters aren’t particularly likeable but they are so recognisable and there’s some really fantastic writing that meant I had real difficulty resisting the urge to devour this in one sitting.

[alice taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

"She is defined by what she is unable to give. She is defined by her lack. She is lack, a void, a blank space that devours."

I don't identify with any of the main themes (motherhood, marriage etc) so seeing the logic behind the ending was initially not as clear to me as it might be to others ig