Synopsis

A small collection of small essays, Abbreviate examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories. In lyric flash prose, Sarah Fawn Montgomery shares a girlhood shaped by neglect and abuse from adults and saved through the communal care of fierce female friends. The essays in this collection probe the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobe with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricochet with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm. Full of stars and scars, Abbreviate examines what happens when girls and women are haunted by hunger and self-erasure, asking us to reconsider the space we make for our secrets, shames, and selves. 

Praise for Abbreviate

Early in Abbreviate, Sarah Fawn Montgomery conjures an image of gender as an asteroid. It’s startling, brilliant, hard to forget. Her memoir-in-essays goes on to map the complex orbit of female embodiment, its rituals (“we form a circle around our hunger, another empty bowl”), paradoxes (“you are only something because you are nothing,” “the trick to feeling alive is to pretend you’re already dead”), and interminable ironies (“they will interrupt to explain to me what I am already telling them”). When an asteroid breaks free from its orbit and enters the earth’s atmosphere as a meteor, it turns incandescent from the friction it has endured. This is a book about breaking old orbits, swerving with insight and outrage at once. Montgomery’s language gleams in every essay, sharp as a blade and finely serrated: “The stars make a big bear and a small bear, a big dog and a small dog, myth a way of teaching us how the world works.” She is the meteor. 

—Julie Marie Wade, author of The Mary Years 

Across each piece in Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate, I found myself tracing one enduring thread, which can be summed up by the opening line of the titular essay—We are reduced, made as small as the letters that now signify ourselves. Repeatedly, young girls and women who have been taught to shrink themselves eventually explode with their knowing. And when they do, they set their surroundings on fire. I fluctuated between helplessness and pent-up rage. I watched these girls and women endure such familiar and painful wrongs. But when I finished, I was left with the heavy reminder that victory for women can wear many masks, can come in the form of direct confrontation, quiet escape, or, sometimes, simple survival. 

—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate is a necessary literary immortalization that defies the male gaze through a sharp dissection of societal sexism and feminine self-fashioning. What do popular doll brands, like American Girl and Polly Pocket say about women and young girls? Though the answer is multi-faceted, there’s no denial of the “blank faces” and formulaic “Polly hair, Polly smile,” while the subject, the young doll collector may “shrink.” But what if young women could escape these confines—take up more space—metaphorically dance in the vastness of the skies and galaxies? In unforgettable bite-sized lyric prose, Sarah Fawn Montgomery sincerely and lovingly tackles all the above in this brilliant, intersectional collection. It’s fitting that Montgomery defies traditional gender roles while she defies traditional genre designations, giving us our “Leos and Kates” in all forms.

—Dorothy Chan, author of Return of the Chinese Femme

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir and Halfway from Home. She is also the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.