Scars heal through stories
Beneath my Scars: Surviving Domestic Violence
by Anna Maskerine
Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$26 / 9781773861593
Reviewed by Susan Sanford Blades
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“[T]here is medicine in sharing stories,” Anna Maskerine states in the beginning of her memoir, Beneath my Scars: Surviving Domestic Violence. This healing power is evident in the collection of memories, montages, dreams, and poems that tell Anna’s story of becoming involved in, enduring, and finally leaving a high-risk abusive relationship with a man she never names. “[T]he final stage of healing is using what happens to you to help other people,” she says, and writing this book is only one way Maskerine has accomplished this. In the nonchronological pieces that make up this book, we learn that, since leaving the abusive relationship, Maskerine worked as a counsellor at a women’s shelter, helped to build Nelson’s first transition house, was a board member of the BC Society of Transition Houses, was appointed to Nelson’s police board, and gives training to police and social workers on how to handle cases of domestic abuse and stalking.
Her story, as she says, doesn’t have a pinpointable beginning, a definite moment when she knew she was in an abusive situation. She likens it to the analogue of the frog in water. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it knows to jump out, but if you slowly turn the heat up in the pot of water a frog is comfortably situated in, it won’t notice the danger in time to leave. Her relationship began, as many abusive situations do, with “love-bombing” by a charming, handsome man—a man everyone loved, a man no one would suspect capable of harm. She fell in love with him, and remained in love for a long time, despite everything. Maskerine explains this is one reason why these relationships are so complicated and so difficult to end. Perpetrators of abuse are often Jekyll and Hyde characters, extremely caring and gentle one moment, inexplicably violent the next. If someone were purely a monster, a relationship with them would be easy to avoid, easy to leave. “If every other minute—every other second, even—of that relationship had been filled with nothing but ecstatic joy and love, any woman would do the same: forgive them, set an ultimatum, but stay.”
We hear about the relationship in bits and pieces, jumping back and forth in time—a decision I’m not sure serves the book. Hearing it in disorganized fragments mostly confused me, especially when names of people we hadn’t yet been introduced to came up, or seemingly important situations, such as the author’s first marriage to a partner who became ill, were mentioned once and never again. Perhaps we’re meant to feel the opposite to the frog—we know from the start that what we’re about to experience vicariously is abuse—or perhaps this memoir is laid out in the way that memory works, scenes and feelings drifting in and out of our consciousness on no apparent schedule. Overall, the point of this book is not to give a play-by-play account of abuse, but to bring awareness to the fact that it happens, how it happens, and how survivors are often improperly supported or not supported at all by those around them and the societal systems in place to protect.
Maskerine gives enough information for us to understand she was in an extremely high-risk, violent relationship. At his worst, her abuser behaved like a psychotic toddler. She describes one night in which he demanded she make him dinner, then threw said dinner to the ground and ordered her to clean up his mess. He then urinated on the floor and tried to suffocate her with a pillow overnight. In the morning, he’d made breakfast and “said good morning as he gently kissed [her] cheek.” She recounts the isolation and shame—not only hers, but his too—she carried throughout the relationship. Living through the relationship, she explains that she had to lie so much about her numerous injuries and bruises, among other things, that nobody really knew her. “A survival strategy for me was staying quiet, head and eyes down.” When she revealed the truth about her relationship to her mother, she told Maskerine, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. And don’t you tell anyone either.” It seemed everyone would rather believe in the version of Maskerine’s partner he presented to the world than face the dangerous and uncomfortable truth.
The police and other so-called support professionals were of no help to her, either. She describes being brushed off by police for calling before he’d actually hurt her—“You can’t call a firetruck before there’s a fire”—being made to feel living with an abusive partner was her choice—it was “time for a lifestyle change”—and being asked to face her abuser in order to make life easier for them—“next time, you might want to just give him [your] paycheque and save everyone a whole lot of trouble.” At one point, after he’d been hospitalized for hurting himself in an attempt to hurt her, nursing staff called Maskerine and begged her to come to the hospital and let him apologize to her because he wouldn’t calm down otherwise and he could die; thus placing his health and safety above hers.
Leaving, she elucidates, came “from hundreds of tiny steps,” and what ultimately pushed her out for good, after many attempts, was the desire to protect her unborn child. She credits Christian with saving her life. Once she found out she was pregnant, she instinctively knew she needed to raise her child on her own. “[M]ost of all,” she says of her book, “it’s a story of a mother’s love for her son.” She also states that the tension–abuse–calm cycle ended for her when the hope that resides in the centre of the cycle disappeared. Maskerine’s diminished hope was for her partner’s potential to be a good man, “that things would be better.” Simply leaving the relationship was not enough, as it is for many survivors of abuse. The author needed to leave her home in Sioux Lookout, where she had lived most of her life until then. Across the country she went, in secret with her son and her new partner, Laurie, when he resurfaced and threats were made on her and her three-year-old son’s lives.
Though Maskerine illustrates her story of abuse thoroughly enough to fulfill this book’s purpose, I found her post-leaving story to be lacking. We hear about her incredible wife, Laurie, throughout the memoir, but Maskerine never lets us in on how she fell in love with her childhood friend. While it was good to hear about her professional accomplishments and the immense amount of important work she’s done helping other women in similar situations since leaving the abusive relationship, I spent most of the book in anticipation of hearing her and Laurie’s redemptive love story, but it never came. It would’ve made her story more complete and perhaps more uplifting, too, to hear about her process of healing, and her process of learning how to love and trust again. Nevertheless, this is a brave and important tale of survival, hope, and love. The light that Anna Maskerine has shone beneath her scars will undoubtedly help many others who find themselves in a situation they never dreamed was meant for them.
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Susan Sanford Blades lives on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking people, the Xwsepsum/Kosapsum and Songhees Nations (Victoria, Canada). Her debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Reader: The Best of Canada’s New Writers and has been published in literary magazines across Canada as well as in the United States and Ireland. Her fiction has been published in Gulf Coast and The Malahat Review. [Editor’s Note: Susan Sanford Blades has reviewed titles by Margot Fedoruk, Pamela Anderson, and Sheila Norgate for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster
