Book Review: Abbreviate

Reviewed by Victoria Lilly

Peek into the quiet and often invisible world of girlhood in this beautifully written memoir-in-flash.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery examines how girls are taught to shrink themselves—be small, silent, submissive—at the expense of their safety or happiness or even selfhood in Abbreviate.

The essays tackle issues of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and the predatory behavior of men and boys in homes, schools, and public spaces. The text does not flinch from portraying the psychic and physical wounds that linger from these experiences well into adulthood.

Recurrent themes and motifs include disordered eating, (auto)objectification, and the shame imposed on young girls’ bodies by adults of both genders. Gym class, locker rooms, and slumber parties become arenas where internalized misogyny and peer pressure take root. Girls are conditioned to be polite, deferential, and invisible, their individuality erased through social norms, quotidian violence, even things as seemingly innocuous as abbreviated names. The titular piece, “Abbreviate,” reflects on how common names like Sarah become symbols of interchangeability and how identity is diluted in an effort to conform.

Amidst the pain, the women and girls of this book find moments of resistance through fantasy, friendship, and artistic creation. Dolls, video cameras, and school projects become tools of escape and assertion. The author is deeply aware of the unreliability of memory and the power of narrative; several essays address the ways women’s voices are doubted or dismissed, both in literature and life, and the necessity of reclaiming one’s story.

It is often noted, with some dose of irony, how said reclaiming and telling one’s story is, for women and girls, a process of misbehaving. In musing on the practice of naming constellations, the second piece in the collection, “Planetarium,” echoes the phrase coined by the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The only women written in the stars are those who rebelled and those who were invariably punished in one way or another.

More often than not, Montgomery’s girls capitulate before their rebellion has properly taken off. Recognizing with an eerie and depressing accuracy the dangers of defying the sexist violence, the molds into which they are meant to conform themselves, they bow their heads and pick the seemingly safer road. As they grow from girls into teenagers into adults, they realize there may be no truly safe option, that they cannot make themselves small enough to escape the violence of our heteronormative society.

Abbreviate is poetic and impressionistic—a deeply moving coming-of-age story and a powerful critique of American culture. It underscores how language, social rituals, and media shape a girl’s understanding of herself and her place in the world. The collection is filled with pervasive motifs and tropes of 20th century American imagery: the poverty-ravaged small town, the run-down amusement parks, the escape toward the big city, the periodical return to visit “the ghosts we once were.”

While the collection is anything but subtle in its messaging about violence—physical, emotional, structural—against girls and women, it compensates for that with a beautiful, rhythmic and colorful style, every sentence a flourish of sound and shadow. The brief vignettes are perfect bite-sized pieces of pathos, and their brevity means the style never overwhelms.

The reality of the lives of Montgomery’s narrator and secondary characters might be grim, but there is beauty in their girlhoods also; bits of it endure into their adulthoods despite all the world’s effort to stamp it out, make it disappear. The powerful dreams of girls might be reduced by society, forced to make them smaller, abbreviated—but can never be fully destroyed.

---

Thank you for reading Victoria Lilly’s book review of Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.