Skin Game: A Memoir [Paperback]

Caroline Kettlewell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2000

Caroline Kettlewell’s autobiography reveals a girl whose feelings of pain and alienation led her to seek relief in physically hurting herself, from age twelve into her twenties. Skin Game employs clear language and candid reflection to grant general readers as well as students an uncensored profile of a complex and unsettling disorder. "[This] mesmeric memoir examines the obsession with cutting that is believed to afflict somewhere around two million Americans, nearly all of them female," Francine Prose noted in Elle. "[Kettlewell’s] language soars and its intensity deepens whenever she is recalling the lost joys and the thrilling sensation of sharp steel against her tender skin."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A number of recent books by journalists and therapists have probed the social and psychological forces behind the alarming practice of self-mutilation; this unflinching memoir tells readers what it feels like. Caroline Kettlewell made her first attempt at age 12 with a Swiss Army knife, too dull to perform satisfactorily, but she quickly graduated to razor blades. "There was a very fine, an elegant pain," she writes of her initiation. "In the razor's wake, the skin melted away ... then the blood welled up ... the chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence." Describing her tense but not unusually difficult youth, the author doesn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out why she was so unhappy, concentrating instead on making palpable her sense of dread and terror of being out of control, emotions relieved by the act of cutting. Some readers may wish for more self-analysis, but others will find Kettlewell's austere prose and sensibility refreshing. "I kept cutting because it worked. When I cut I felt better, " she explains. "I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting." Not the fanciest way to put it, but those sentences, like the entire book, have the cadences of "the plain and inelegant truth." --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Following last year's A Bright Red Scream by journalist Marilee Strong, Cutting by psychotherapist Steven Levenkron and Bodily Harm by self-injury treatment program directors Karen Conterio, Wendy Lader and Jennifer Kingson Bloom, this memoir is touted as the first personal account of compulsive self-mutilation. However, Kettlewell's story leaves more questions unaddressed than it answers. Having regularly cut her body with razor blades for most of her life, at age 36 she does not seem to have enough distance from her actions to fully understand them. Searching for a reason for her behavior, she writes about the distress and anxiety she felt during most of her childhood in rural Virginia, where her educated Northern parents were rarities. Unsure if her misery was justified, Kettlewell never talked about it, instead escaping by cutting her arms and legs, which allowed her to focus only on the present moment, the certainty of blood and pain. She still doesn't know whether she is entitled to the mental anguish she continues to suffer, and the bulk of the book, by detailing her misery, simply begs the question.We learn surprisingly few details about her lifeAa first marriage is summarized in a few sentences; her eating disorder in a few pages; her parents, second husband and child are never fully characterized. The text jumps repetitively and illogically between episodes, occasionally registering confusion at the level of the sentence structure ("Which one of us did I lie to protect?" is typical), and rife with maudlin metaphors and similes ("summer fell across my lap like a corpse"). Although Kettlewell's story shows courage in the writing, it will make most readers feel like voyeurs. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (June 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312263937
• ISBN-13: 978-0312263935
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Opened up for the world to see, September 21, 2005

By 

anorexic skincauldron (Bucks County PA. USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skin Game: A Memoir (Paperback)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars With Blade in Hand, Kettlewell Plays Psychic Dodgeball, August 18, 2002

By 

Blues Newbie "growlygirl" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skin Game: A Memoir (Paperback)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars conflict of style, December 27, 2000

By 

Jessi A. Fehrenbach (Lexington, KY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skin Game: A Memoir (Paperback)

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.