Words & Wounds: A Review of Sensitive Creatures
Kirsten Reneau in the French Quarter, photo by Ellis Anderson
August 2024The essays in this powerful debut memoir by New Orleans writer Kirsten Reneau unflinchingly explore trauma, using nature as a touchstone to find understanding – and healing.
– by Skye Jackson
“I am known for picking at open wounds,” Kirsten Reneau writes, kicking off her debut collection of memoir in essays with an image that is as haunting as it is visceral. Reneau moves through the text with a beauty and brutality that is felt from the moment one first turns the initial pages until putting the book down.
Reneau’s focus on the natural world as she details her own experiences with sexual assault, keep the reader engaged and enthralled through lush scenes and in unflinching depictions of men who take and touch and harm without thought for the pain and trauma they have inflicted upon young Reneau. Her probing examination on the depth of this trauma and her daring experimentation with form make this a collection worth returning to time and time again.
This column is made possible in part by Karen Hinton and Howard Glaser
Reneau’s portrayal of the natural world is vivid and alluring, forcing the reader to view it not only as all-encompassing but most importantly, as breathing and alive.
She writes, “I learn to lay my body down against a canoe and trust the river to rock me back and forth as if I am still buried in the depths of my mother.”
It is elemental, the way Reneau describes what it means to be animal and to inhabit another body – whether that’s by force or as caretaker.
The reader sees immediately that she views nature as powerful, all-consuming and nurturing. This sumptuous imagery envelops as we dive deeper into the emotional landscape that Reneau has cultivated here.
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But just as Reneau shows us the gentle side of nature, she also portrays the cold and cruel – waxing poetic on cicadas buried deep within the earth and their eventual screaming emergence to the surface of that world. In another startling image, she describes “a casket made out of clouds,” showing us the dark realities that nature can present as well.
This darkness manifests through the text particularly in Reneau’s exploration of the trauma and sexual assault she suffers at the hands of men from her past.
She writes, “I often dreamt of men who would pull my bones out of my body, leaving me loose and alone.” These dreams, which occur as a response to the violence that Reneau experienced, show us a speaker not only haunted in her waking life but tormented in her sleeping one as well.
This pain – of never quite feeling safe in one’s own body – is a theme that Reneau constantly returns to as she examines the intricacies of her own life and struggles. To that note, she writes, “…I carry the guilt of it all the same, the invisible open gash of living in a woman’s body that other people have tried to claim as their own.” Reneau contends with this dichotomy – the pain of trying to protect the body and mind when the world seeks to do otherwise.
This is what makes Reneau’s decision to utilize the memoir in essay format so effective. In her exploration of the genre, author Elizabeth Kedetsky wrote, “An author’s ability to forgive that earlier version of herself is especially prevalent in the memoir-in-essays, perhaps because of the extended time period covered as a writer who composes essays across years or even decades.”
Reneau flips skillfully through time as though she were sifting through the pages of a beloved book – with delicacy, care and yet, a searing eye for the details that matter. Despite this seriousness, there is also a vein of dark humor that Reneau manages to convey through the form as well.
This is demonstrated most evidently in the piece, “Quiz: Do You Have a Healthy Relationship to Sex?” The essay, which is designed to appear as a quiz that one might find within the pages of Cosmo, presents the ominous implications on what it means to be forced to deal with confusing messaging regarding bodily image and society’s unrealistic expectations of women.
Peering into Dauphine Street Books on Chartres Street, photo by Ellis Anderson
She writes, “You grow up watching movies about princesses and the men who love them. You dress up as them for Halloween, during playtime, whenever you can. Later it’s shows like Rock of Love and Flavor of Love, reality TV where it is always women competing for men’s affections.”
Reneau’s willingness to show the complexity of this imaging and the way that women are constantly forced to mold themselves to fit into these extreme depictions are so authentic and palpable to those forced to participate in that system. More than that, they also examine the negative and traumatic impact of the male gaze as a destructive agent in our cultural messaging.
Ultimately, Reneau’s debut is as real as it is revelatory, presenting complex and topical issues that are crushingly relatable. Her writing both sings and stings, as the natural world, placed on full display, illuminates the layered emotional world that she has created. Reneau draws connections between each of the “sensitive creatures” she presents in her terrific debut, highlighting the fierce and fragile worlds that they occupy both upon the page and beyond it.
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