Customer Reviews

Skin Game

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Unfortunately, for cutters and former cutters alike, there are few books on the shelves which address the issue of self-injury. Certainly, it's slim pickins when it comes to books which we can relate to. If it's a garbage book about cutting, that's what we're stuck reading, because there are few other options.

Fortunately for us, Caroline Kettlewell's Skin Game is quite a fantastic read, and one of the most well written memoirs I've ever read.

As an earlier reviewer noted (and criticized the book for), similes and metaphors are shoe-horned in abundant, and sometimes absurd quantities within the text of this book. With an insatiable hunger for metaphor, this actually boosts my own love affair with this book.

Skin Game's penmanship has a split personality feel, a delectable glitch which I'm sure Kettlewell wasn't aiming for, or may still be completely unaware of. Kettlewell #1, recalling somewhat "normal" teenage activities, isn't much varied from the average memoir writer. However, when undertaking the act of cutting itself, Kettlewell seems to get lost in the ecstasy of those moments, whereupon Kettlewell #2 emerges and assumes the role of author. Metaphors become more prominent, language becomes more complex, and there is a barrage of resonant details which make the reader feel as if he/she is not only sitting on the bed by Kettlewell's side during the ordeal, but inside of Kettlewell's skin itself. I must give a warning to cutters: These juicy morsels of the book can be VERY TRIGGERING. I first read this book after 2 years of abstaining from cutting, yet even after such a lengthy time, these graphic passages were enough to make me crave reverting back to the habit more than I had ever wanted to before. It should also be noted that Skin Game fiddles around a smidgen with Kettlewell's bout with anorexia, though it is inevitably cutting which stays on the top pedestal of subject matter throughout the book.

SPOILER ALERT!: I was a bit eager to stomp the rating down to 4 stars due to a very poorly constructed ending. One gets the impression that Kettlewell simply got bored of writing the book and attempted to stitch things up quite quickly (no pun intended). It's ends up being quite a slop job. Pop a Paxil, get tapped on the head by your fairy Godmother's magic wand, and everything's suddenly A' OK! Kettlewell herself writes "I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting..." C'mon Caroline. C'mon. Stop lying to yourself, and to us. The truth would've been a much more interesting read.

Despite this meager faltering however, Skin Game is quite a powerful, and painful (in a good way) read, ultimately enough to hold a 5 star rating.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for anyone who struggles or who has ever struggled with the issue of cutting.

There's no doubt in my mind that Kettlewell's intentions in writing this book were sincere. She writes well, if a tad melodramatically (which may appeal to teens, but I'm full-grown and found it overwrought in places). In terms of retelling the physical realities of her world, she is quite forthcoming, and one gets the sense that she tells her story to get her emotional truth out there, in hopes of universalizing the experience of self-harm. This can't be easy, when you consider that like most people who self-harm, coping with and facing emotional treachery is difficult for her. Been there, I know of which I speak.

That said, for a book that aims to lay bare her emotional and psychic self, she *totally* wusses out on making any kind of connection between her behavior and her thought processes, and how they evolve over time. So we get this chapter-after-chapter replay of her history as a self-harmer, then, at the end, la la la, "Oh I know it ain't what ya want to hear, but BY GOLLY, the doctor plopped my newborn child in my arms, and I *just plum stopped cutting*! Because I *could*"

Please.

This evinces either lazy writing or lazy self-analysis. Surely, there was some useful revelation, some change in thought pattern or self-concept that led her to stop harming herself. Something inside her must have changed, because her external behavior did. Can't have the former without the latter.

I guess this is a useful book if you want to read how cutters cut, or to be assured that other people do what you do yourself, but as far as I'm concerned, for an author who reveals her self-harming behavior in almost pornographic detail to totally stint on any useful revelation about how she pulled back on said behavior constitutes a wimp-out of a magnitude far greater than any stress-evading swipe with a blade.

What could have been both revealing and reassuring just seems like another self-evasion, wrapped around advertisements for Wilkinson Bond products. Bummer.

From the first sentence to the last, Kettlewell describes her addiction to self mutilation in painstaking detail and precise language. Although I could identify with her experiences, the structure of the language and ivy league precision of her writing style took away from the passion and depth behind the pain and roots of self-mutilation. Such passionate and manic symptoms should be described with the same wreckless abandon and emotional turmoil that fuel them. The crafty language just manages to subdue and organize something that really isn't that cut and dried.

i'm an 11th grade student reading "skin game" for a psychology project at school. I found the subject of self-mutilation intriguing, thats why I picked the book and I was indeed intrigued. Caroline Kettlewell's writing style draws you in, it feels almost like you're talking to her face to face. The issues in the book that Caroline is faced with, are things that I have also felt. I can understand what drove her to begin "cutting" and can relate to her thoughts and moods. I think that's why I enjoyed reading this book so much. I've always though of "self mutilation" as something crude, messy, and the person doing the cutting as psychotic. However reading this book really changed my view point, and I can see that anyone can be affected by it. I reccommend to all, especially teenage girls who can probably identify with some of the problems Caroline faced - like I did.

Author Caroline Kettlewell was a self-injurer, a "cutter," for over a decade. She started in seventh grade when her parents cut her off from the older boys she enjoyed hanging out with (Kettlewell was a 12-year-old faculty brat at an all-boys boarding school, so is it any wonder she was slumming around with male adolescents?). Kettlewell freely admits that she didn't understand what propelled her to cut at the time, that as a grown women she can offer many theories, but she questioned her own motives in the moment. Was she crazy? Did she want attention? What was she trying to achieve?

Kettlewell fits the profile of a self-injurer well. She was young, female, and suffering from an ancillary eating disorder, which, in itself, is about extreme control and self-punishment. Many cutters also suffer childhood sexual abuse, and while Kettlewell does not consciously recall any memories of abuse, she certainly had a troubled relationships with the opposite sex. She went through a self-described "blur" of boyfriends and was divorced within a few years of her college graduation.

Kettlewell's memoir, at its core, consists of a series of personal essays. She feels compelled to cram in discussions of therapy and of "life beyond cutting" in the last few chapters, but she hints strongly that these are compulsory chapters, and not the ones she was compelled to write. She's not offering any answers or solutions, or even much scientific evidence. This is both a strength and a weakness of the memoir. Personally, the structure of the book frustrated me. Despite consisting of less than 200 pages, the chapters number thirty-three, and many of those are two or three pages long. No delineation between chapters is obvious to the reader. In fact, in Part Two, chapters repeatedly open with either an allusion to the all-encompassing question of "why?" or a statement to the effect of, "I had no answers at the time."

Frankly, I am torn over my assessment of this memoir. It is certainly beautifully written, and Kettlewell is a master of language. I underlined many phrases to record and reflect on in my personal journal. However, it falls far short of being one of my top-recommended books on troubled childhoods or self-destructive behaviors. It lacks a clear narrative architecture and takes the form of a rambling collection of personal reflections. I didn't take away any message from it. Some may argue that the lack of a message is the strength of the memoir, so if you are seeking reflections and experiences with no larger structure, then this book is for you. My top recommended book on self-injury, however, is Bright Red Scream, which covers topics from scientific opinions to treatment options to personal anecdotes. In YA fiction, Patricia Mccormick`s Cut is recommended.

I (as a cutter myself) know the emotions the author is realiting to in this book, at first i found it as an excellent referenst to say to people "read this page - that is how i feel today" and then i got to the grafic parts, she goes into a lot of detail, a word of warning to anyone reading this on their road to recovery, make sure u are safe when reading as some of its contents may be Triggering.

This book is really quite useless if you are trying to learn more about SIB, or trying to understand SIB as a personal phenomenon. It's also a bore just to read. Kettlewell spends too much time on irrelevant navel-gazing (too much even for a memoir, if possible), creating a self-centered adolescent tone that overwhelms the delicate psychology of SIB. This book was obviously thrown together as publishers reconized the growing market for literature about SIB. This book is not many things: it is not typical or representative of normal SIB; it is not revelatory or interesting; it is not mature; it is not useful; it is not worth its time.

For the best book on SIB read Strong's "A Bright Red Scream." For the best book containing personal experiences of SIB, read Miller's "Women who Hurt Themselves" or Conterio & Lauder's "Bodily Harm." For another really awful book about SIB, read Levenktron's "Cutting." It's even worse than "Skin Game."

I read Skin Game to see if I could use it in a college course I teach on young womand and coming of age. While I enjoyed reading this book and learning more about self-mutilation from Kettlewell's perspective, there is one major element of her writing that distracted me from fully enjoying the book: she uses too many comparisions, usually similes and sometimes metaphors. On almost EVERY SINGLE PAGE there is a simile, comparing one thing to something else, and sometimes there were several similes on one page...or even in one paragraph!

The overabundance of this technique got really old and annoying by about page 20. Even though I stuck with the book, for it is an enjoyable read, I found myself skipping over her similes and wishing she'd just say what she felt instead of comparing it to something else. Like a this, like a that. I have never seen so many similes in one book! I am surprised Kittlewell's editors didn't catch this problem.

As for the reader who focused on her "big words" - if I were to use this book in the college classroom, I would tell my students to circle and learn all the unfamiliar words as they are all on the GREs! :)

Overall, an interesting and mostly well-written book...but too many similes distracted this reader from fully appreciating it.

It took me months to read this book (even though its under 200 pages)and several books between. Try as I might, I just couldn't get into it. I kept waiting for it to get good. She just seemed to try to hard at writing a good book. It was like reading a student's paper in a writing class - they want it to be good so they add in big words and very discriptive passages without ever paying attention to the actually story. I can't quite explain it, but it was like she wanted to tell her story, and just as she got to really get into it, she backed away and moved on the next subject. I felt that the suject matter was jumping back and forth, with never really telling the reader what is going on. We are kept at a distant, as though she really didn't want us to know what happend. I don't even feel like the book should present itself as a self cutter's memoir, for that is only a fraction of the book. And again it never really goes into it. The only good parts of this book were the ones where she was describing the "cutting" moments, for it was those times that the book finally gets passionate about something. I think if she stopped trying to write so well, and paid attention to her story/plot then she could write a good book. I don't recommend this book, it would probably be a waste of your time, unless you are trying to read every book out there about self harm.

As you grow up, you're taught that every scar tells a story and I believe that Caroline Kettlewell has proved that point.

This book is a remarkable memoir of growing up with self-mutilation. She tells of how it looked, felt, etc. It can get a bit graphic, but sometimes, you need the graphic stuff in order to understand the feelings.

I think that this book is exquisite. I think every self-injurer could identify with the feelings that Caroline went through. I think that non-'cutters' could identify with some of the feelings, too.

This book gives cutters a feeling of not being alone and non-cutters a way to understand what it's like to hurt so much that you have to hurt yourself.

There aren't enough words to describe how awesome this book is. I just hope that it helps you to understand how serious self-mutilation really is.