Book Review: The Daughter Ship by Boo Trundle

The Importance of Reading and the Joy of a Great Book

*** 3/3 ***

The Daughter Ship by Boo Trundle

I’ve been reading a ton lately.  I’ve always been a reader, but this has come in waves.  Growing up and through college, absolutely.  For a few years thereafter.  And then silence when I stepped into the deep professional world.

I emerged from that period more than a decade ago, but the reading muse did not really return until divorce and transition came along.  In truth, it started up again just before I saw a dominatrix for the first time and was mostly centred around self-exploration.

It is women who are the great readers of the world.  If you are a writer and you want to sell books, write for women.  Many, like my soon-to-be-ex-wife, read fluff, but many others read challenging and complex works.  Somewhere along the line in our dynamic, my first domina gave me a reading list.  I had asked her for a list of the books that she felt had most contributed to her world view, her sense of self, and that she had enjoyed most in life, including and starting with childhood.  What flowed back was a list of 200+ titles, many of which I shared fond experiences of.  The rest became a nucleus of shared pleasure.  I continue to read through them, and no, none of them will be reviewed here.  Although she is no longer in my life, I do have a duty of care towards her privacy and the intimate aspects of our interaction—and this is one of them.

That particular list morphed into a new list.  A list of books that she asked me to read to enable me to help with some tasks she asked of me.  I enjoyed this very much.  Doing research for a domina whom you care for, respect, and whose success you wish to contribute to and support, is very fulfilling.

Somehow, along the way, reading, reading lot’s, has just come back into my life with force.  I have joined a woman’s reading group and it is a source of incredible joy to be accepted and processed not as the man I was, or even as an ex-man, but as the trans woman I am so proud to be.

The Book

One of the recent books that has come up is the topic of this post.  It is The Daughter Ship, by Boo Trundle.

This is an adult book, a novel, and one which resonated with me on a profound level.  The book itself describes healing.  In that sense, it is an observed journey through personal growth, coping, and development.

The starting point is sexual trauma.  Inappropriate parent-child relations.  This speaks to me as any of my readers will know.  It is both the source wound of my own existence, but also the prime motivator in my charitable engagements.  A trusted adult who violates a child is evil.

If you know about Internal Family Systems, a healing modality, or parts work, the device of the novel and its narrative structure will make sense.  The book is the story of a woman coping with her past, family life and the impact of sexual abuse, but told through the lens of her many fragmented personalities.  As we know from IFS, these personalities come into existence as a way to help the core person to cope with their wounded parts.

The narration moves skilfully between these “people”, so that you can clearly hear distinct voices.  They are alive.  

There are few books I have read in life which give you the feeling of the true weight that the narrator carries.  It is crushing.  I did cry as I read this, particularly at the beginning, when it dawned on me what the book was really about.  For the rest, it was like watching a slow-moving crash.

The book, despite its intensely dark subject, is witty and at times humorous, and is also fundamentally optimistic and life-affirming.  If anything, the message is that “no matter how bad the trauma, there is a way out.”

I loved this book and take my hat off to the author who had the courage and the skill to bring such a difficult subject to life in such a colossally elegant way.

The Publisher Writes

“This irreverent debut delivers a headlong human comedy of trauma and triumph, narrated by the concealed inner selves of a woman on the brink: Katherine, a lost creative soul and suburban mother of two, who has struggled into her forties with the urge to self-harm.”