When I Hit You : Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

When I Hit You : Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
ISBN: 9781786491268
Publication Date: 24 May 2017

Informed and inspired by her own experiences, Kandasamy's second novel is a dazzling and provocative novel of an abusive marriage.

Seduced by politics and poetry, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife, but what for her is a contract of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape.

Smart, fierce and courageous When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.

About the Author

Meena Kandasamy (born 1984) is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who is based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), and the critically acclaimed novel, Gypsy Goddess.