By Victor Greto
No one is ever one thing.
If Billie Travalini’s recently published memoir, “Bloodsisters,” tells the reader anything, it’s that an emotionally and sexually abused child is as multi-dimensional as one lucky enough to have a relatively happy childhood.
“I can’t be too detailed in some parts,” says Travalini, of the Delaware childhood chronicled in her book.
“There’s only so much sadness that people can take,” she says. “When you write something that is a tragedy, when you only focus on the tragic incidents in your life, you don’t become a whole person.”
It also shows that even within a severely dysfunctional family, rotten from the head down, there exists hope.
“We all want unconditional love,” Travalini says. “And that’s what my sister gave me. She saved my life.”
“Bloodsisters” was published after winning the first $1,000 nonfiction Lewis and Clark Discover Award. The award, given for unpublished creative nonfiction, was inaugurated to “build credentials for a new author,” says Mark Sanders, an assistant editor and professor of English at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho.
“The voice was fresh and unusual,” says Sanders, who helped judge the contest. “A lot of times memoirs are written from someone looking back, but this book is from the person’s point of view at the time. That’s different.”
Travalini’s literary voice effortlessly flows from the mind of an 11-year-old to create an intense and compellingly detailed account studded with childlike detail of games, feelings, relationships with siblings, parents and friends that fit the abuse in a richer context.
In 1960, she was taken away from a caring foster parent near Delaware City by her Wilmington working class parents, years after they had given her up because her mother suffered from severe post-partum depression.
Over the several months imaginatively compressed in the book, her father emotionally and sexually abused her.
“I don’t feel that child is me anymore,” Travalini says of the character of Annie, the little girl who tells the story. “I wrote the book for all the little Annies out there who need support, a voice for people to listen to, and for all adults who are not healed.”
That said, the chilling descriptions of abuse are only snippets of the horrors she says she received from her father, including two attempts to kill her.
But the everyday horror of being a child under the sway of a mercurial parent is plain, even in an initially innocuous scene of the family playing a game of Scrabble.
“I guess I’ll go last,” my father moaned, checking my mother’s face for a reaction.
“That’s good of you,” my mother smiled.
My father smiled back but his eyes didn’t match his smile. They were dark and brooding. It was like looking at a volcano right before it erupted. My father’s whole body began to tremble with a slow anger that seemed to build from his feet up. I glanced at Kate and she glanced at me and that was it. One second my mother was calling out a word and the next second my father was shoving the Scrabble board across the table and letters were flying everywhere.
The memoir, which the author first wrote as a series of stories and then a novel, returned to its nonfiction roots soon after Travalini read parts of it to her sister, whom she calls Kate in the book.
Kate is the “bloodsister” – the two pricked their fingers and mingled their blood for solidarity – who at times protected her from their father.
Travalini’s sister, Virginia Bailey, the real “Kate,” now lives in Coos Bay, Ore. She says she was “anxious” about seeing her sister’s version of events published for the world to read.
“When you’re abused as a child, it’s very private,” Bailey says. “Especially back then. Our best friends didn’t even know what was going on when we were children.”
Several years ago, when Travalini began reading chapters to her over the phone as they were being written, it felt like “instant replay,” Bailey says.
“I used to have nightmares over this, bad nightmares,” she says. “But the more we’ve talked about it, the more separate I’ve been able to become from it.”
Both Travalini and Bailey say that the book stops short of the squalid reality of growing up in their family.
“That’s partly why it’s not as hard for me reading the book and having the book come out,” Bailey says. “It’s such a soft interpretation of what actually went on.”
It also was Bailey who inspired Travalini to make it a memoir.
As she read chapters to Bailey, her sister told her, “‘Please, like this wasn’t true,’“ Travalini says. “So I decided to make it a memoir.”
***
“Part of the deal winning the award is that it got published,” says Travalini’s literary agent, Rosalie Siegel.
But neither Siegel nor Travalini are satisfied with the edition published in November by Lewis-Clark Press.
At $14, the paperback’s first edition has many typographical flaws. An edition of only 500 copies was issued, and is not available on Amazon.com. Only a handful of independently-owned bookstores in the region are carrying copies.
Siegel says she is looking for a bigger publisher to professionally edit the work and give it the audience it deserves.
“This is more than a Delaware book,” she says.
The childlike point of view and attention to detail in the book, Travalini says, “is used for the reader to see an abused and neglected child in the completeness of the child, not just with an incident.”
But that goes for all the characters in the book, she says. “You are denied thinking one-dimensionally about anyone.”
Through its matter-of-fact detail, the author also fleshes out as ugly a character as her father, who shows dimensions of kindness.
In one later scene, the father kindly helps Annie bury her cat, an animal she had since she came home from the foster home.
“He could be nice,” Travalini says of her father. “It was those times when you had a glimmer that things would be better.”
But this only made the daily terror of living with a mercurial parent more alarming.
The father always blames Annie for the family’s woes, cracking her lip open with his hand, or sexually abusing her as the family leaves for the day to shop.
“If only he had been all rotten, we would at least have had some security,” Travalini says. “Those glimmers allow the abuser to continue abusing. It’s like bait to fish.”
The narrator’s encompassing understanding toward everyone in the book also reflects an attitude Travalini says she had even as a small child.
“I don’t know why, but I thought my father was sick, and knew that someone that was healthy wouldn’t do such things,” she says. “I never thought of the why. I just wanted to be safe, and prayed every day that he would get well. That tomorrow things would get better.”
Things never did.
“My father was never punished for what he did to us,” Travalini says.
He was 62 when he died of a stroke in 1970, after having open heart surgery. He’d had a literal hole in his heart since he was a child, she says.
“Dad had warned that if mom ever died, he would hunt us down and kill us,” Virginia Bailey says.
But their mother outlived their father by 15 years.
Neither sister will forget the ironic sight of their father lying helpless in his hospital bed.
“When I went to see him in the hospital,” Bailey says, “he was a shrunken little old man in the bed. I remember staring at his face because I didn’t recognize him. I went out to the desk and asked if this was him. This big, awful man had become this shrunken pathetic little man.”