Review by Lara Lillibridge
Skip It, Spice Girls, vanilla body spray, Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers and frosted eyeshadow. “We’ve grown up when being captured on-screen is still a novelty.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery captures all of the desperation, longing, and joy of a 1990’s girlhood in this slim but powerful chapbook, where girls “…learn hesitation more than certainty.”
A time when sexism and sexual assault were routine, Montgomery grows up on the page, graduating from high school teachers who sleep with students to college professors who do the same, learning and rebelling against a culture that tells girls how to be silent, how to be nice, how they will never be believed. “I wonder if a woman is a fact or a fiction,” she writes. Yet, as she ages, the gender-based violence and silencing does not change.
But it is with her female friends that she finds the gentleness she seeks.
There was the friend who was secretly dating a teacher…There was the friend who gave herself to any boy who would have her because her father said she was conceived to replace a dead sister. There was the friend who threw up after every meal. The friend who cut herself to feel. The friend who hated herself because she hated a girl loving a girl.
How I loved them, these girls.
These friends save and nurture each other in a world filled that does not want them to take up room.
Now, Montgomery refuses to be silent, her words loud on the page, writing the truth of the casual violence female bodies experience, her voice bigger than the slimness of this book implies. “You know it doesn’t matter what you say, your words, like your body, not of much worth.”
Poignant, inspiring, gentle and strong by turn, Montgomery’s first and second person essays are concise and intimate, vibrant and compelling. I saw my own childhood through a new lens—the fights with boys, the way they got the use the microfiche machine and the girls didn’t, the way they took up all the space in the room—I had not thought about it as systematic sexism before, rather I had just thought these particular boys were jerks and these particular teachers indifferent. Reading Montgomery’s words opened me up to the reality that my experience is universal—female students in the 1990s were treated differently, with different rules and expectations. And this realization lit a fire inside me. I highly recommend for any woman of our generation.
Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
ISBN: 9781957248509
Small Harbor Publishing, 2025
74 Pages
Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning; Mama, Mama, Only Mama: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent; and Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home. Lara is a Creative Nonfiction Co-editor for HeartWood Literary Magazine and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from West Virginia Wesleyan College.