THE CHAIN

A personal story of misogyny and a study of the world that enabled it.

In 2017, Suleyman’s boyfriend left her, for good, at an abortion clinic in Queens. Emerging from her devastation to seek an explanation of that day and its preceding events, she discovered an Instagram post that led her to dozens of women victimized by the same man. These women and their stories spanned the globe, showing a perpetrator who preyed on their proclivities for caretaking and self-doubt. The author shows how he deviously exploited harmful assumptions ingrained in both women and men about what women can and should be asked to withstand at the hands of men. Suleyman passionately calls out and critiques each of these assumptions and the harm they enact. In this consistently acute analysis, the author addresses attitudes about mental health, vulnerability related to immigration status and racial identity, the belittling of women in comedy bits, and nuances ignored in debates about abortion. With the heat of anger and a steady, stunning tempo, Suleyman stacks her experiences with those of the man’s other victims to demonstrate the insidious nature of gaslighting and abuse. The text is a cautious corrective to the optimism of movements like #MeToo, holding the healing and community of a group of survivors that might only have formed in our modern age against stubborn attitudes about women shaped decades ago. “It is tiresome living in a world where experience becomes truth only in volume, truth validated only in numbers,” she writes. “But I understood that this is how it goes. And so did he.” Suleyman deftly interrogates the heart of these truths, and her book is impressive as much for the author’s skill and elegance as for the terror of the story that fuels it.

A maddening tale told with insistence, insight, and beauty.