Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
I’m still a child, only as tall as my father’s shotgun.
So begins Betty’s story. Betty is a fictionalised account of the author’s own mother as she comes of age in Breathed, a town set in the foothills of Ohio Appalachia. The daughter of a Native American man and a white woman, Betty is half Cherokee and, unlike her siblings, looks it. A source of consternation for the oft-bullied “Little Indian”. But for Betty, the scariest place may be at home, where secrets and trauma plague her family members and sour every interaction. This is the story of a young girl. This is a story of a family, of a loving father. This is a story of women and how abuse gets mapped upon young female bodies.
Set primarily in the 1960s, Tiffany McDaniel’s work transports the reader, particularly the Australian one, to a completely different time and place. Told from a child’s perspective, the novel draws upon Bible verses, Native American folklore and a series of news articles to trace Betty’s childhood. Comparisons to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Toni Morrison’s Beloved seem apt here. As a work of biographical fiction, it also reminded me of Tara Westover’s Educated and Jeanette Wall’s The Glass Castle.
Be forewarned: this is not an easy or gentle read. It contains graphic descriptions of sexual and domestic abuse. One of the novel’s main concerns is the legacy of trauma and McDaniel pulls no punches in that regard. But the author’s main talent lies in her ability to make the harrowing, the mundane, and the everyday into something lyrical and rewarding for the reader. Again, this is not an easy read, but it is an important one.
