Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice (review)

Abstract

Those who have experienced trauma and loss know that new losses replicate prior grief and sorrow, offering an opportunity for reflection and deeper understanding about what such losses tell us about ourselves. Too often, people pass up this opportunity in an attempt to get past the pain. In Living Between Danger and Love, however, Kathleen Jones takes it up ambivalently but courageously. Most immediately, the book is an attempt to fathom the death of Andrea O'Donnell, a women's studies student at Jones's university who was strangled by her boyfriend in November 1994. Jones takes this tragedy as a lens through which to examine her own life's traumas and losses. But this book is not a mere psychological autobiography; it is a social history of women's lives. Jones's adulthood begins at the same time as the women's movement in 1968, and they echo one another repeatedly, producing a narrative that weaves a complicated but remarkable tapestry of an individual life forged within a larger context of dramatic social change and upheaval.