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Unsexed book coverSearching for Mother Love

Author: Marina DelVecchio

Marina’s life is one of being in-between, merging into the unseen grey areas, a ghost, unwanted, unloved, misunderstood, fading away, longing to step into the quite blackness of non-existence. To her, this othering is the definition of life as a woman, as a child with two mothers who never wanted her: the first a violent prostitute, the second a verbally abusive asexual. In Unsexed Marina shares her despair and strength, clawing her way through extreme trauma and abuse, physical and mental. Unsexed is her story, the dance between objectification and the longing for love that has plagued her life, defined her relationships, and informed her perceptions of sex, femininity, and men.

Marina begins her memoir by recalling how sex was used by her volatile birth mother, Athanasia. It was transactional. Shameful. Painful. Meaningless and violent. It bought them a chicken for dinner. Under the tutelage of her mother’s pimp, Kristos, Marina fought the grooming. But she saw her future, saw and knew how she would be sold, her body something outside of herself. Something she grew to hate. This first mother did not love her, and her weak father fled to protect himself, denying his children, allowing them to fracture across orphanages and continents.  It was the first of many betrayals.

Then, there is Ann, the mother who adopts Marina, renaming her Kathryn. Ann is potentially more of an enigma than Athanasia. She is a virgin, asexual, fiercely independent, and deeply cruel. Her volatility is not physical, instead manifesting as steady, planned mental debasement. She calls her daughter a whore for being late, for failing to do simple tasks, for displeasing her in any way. Her love is constantly withheld. There are no gentle touches of motherhood, no simple hugs, no companionship. Instead, Ann is an enemy, a person to be watched and feared. With her, Marina contemplates and attempts suicide for the first time, crying in the bathroom at 12, trying to ram scissors into her chest and end the constant search for withheld love.

Marina never experiences maternal love, never finds a tribe of her own, and her husband, Richard, proves to be just another taker, another abuser who twists words until Marina backs down, backs into herself. Marina becomes nothing. Unsexed. Othered. Suicidal. Until she decides to fight back, at first for her children’s sake, but later for her own, attempting to reconcile this hatred of her body, her sex, with ideas of love, acceptance, and belonging.  She fights to tell her story, honestly, openly, unvarnished, showing that women are not objects to be bought or molested, that love is not unconditional (we should and must expect decent behavior from those in our lives), and that we should give ourselves the love that others refuse us. In the end, Marina becomes her own mother, her own friend, and slowly, gradually, starts the uphill journey to reclaim her body and her sex, not to please men, but for herself.

Throughout her memoir, Marina uses beautiful language to describe the ugliness of adults, the selfishness, and the lasting impacts of abuse, including generational abuse and learned behaviors. Her metaphors and prose create a poetic longing, evoking the desire for death and love, a juxtaposed warring between wanting to stay in this world and wanting to exit it, to depart as she came, unloved. Unsexed is, in many ways, a brutal story, but because of that, it must be read. While Marina’s experiences are (hopefully) extreme, these cultural ideas of who deserves love and what that means, of how we use sex, either for money or love or to buy some semblance of normalcy, affect us all in some way. For those of us who are lucky, we merely know others who have experienced othering and abuse. For many of us, however, some moments in this memoir ring true to our own experiences and the expectations and shame levied against us as women.

Unsexed also made me, personally, think beyond the text. Marina’s main cry is one for love, and everyone fails her. Some of them fail her spectacularly (her mothers, her husband) and others in the normal way of all flawed humans (her children, her friends.) It is then only in God that we ever find and experience true love, the love we need to ground us, give us meaning, and move on. The true mothering. This, of course, is my own take on the story and the ultimate “meaning of life” questions posed throughout the text, and not the author’s actual point, which is more geared towards feminism and humanism. Still, everyone who reads this will be forced to confront the big questions of life and approach an answer or at least a way of dealing with the defining factor of our existence: a need to belong, to be loved, to be seen. For me, humans can never truly do that, because our soul longs for and is made for far more.

It always amazes me when I read a memoir like Unsexed, that someone could be so open with their soul, to be willing to put the most difficult, heartrending moments of their life on a page and open their arms to us, the readers, giving us this special access. It’s an honor to share in another’s story, to hear it, to step into this moment of utter vulnerability with another person whom we might never meet face to face. Marina shares everything and is empowered through her vulnerability. Her lessons are ones for all readers: lessons about love and consent and how to step away from abusers and toxic relationships. It’s a hard read, in many ways, but one with a lot of important things to say and one that, despite the darkness, shares a bit of light, a bit of final hope.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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