Street Smart Safety for Women: The Writing Process By Laura Frombach

Street Smart Safety for Women: The Writing Process

By 

Laura Frombach

“Could it have been the violence?”

That question at that moment was the genesis for Street Smart Safety for Women: Your Guide to Defensive Living. It was a sentence that would change my life. 

I’d grown up with family violence, had been the victim of several violent encounters as an adult and was married to a cop. Up till then, I thought that I knew pretty much everything that a non-professional could know about violence against women. But that sudden flash of insight proved just how wrong I was. 

My mother was a mentally ill violent alcoholic. But the family that she grew up with insisted that she hadn’t always been that way, that she’d once been the “nicest girl they knew.” They must have asked me hundreds of times if I knew what happened to her. I truly had no idea. I knew that my father was violent, but then, so was his whole family. I grew up believing that violence was, quite actually, normal. 

And although domestic violence had no part of my life as an adult, it’s ghostly specter haunted my psyche and I spent three decades in therapy. Then, seemingly out of the blue, I felt that intuitive flash that explained the source of my mother’s madness. Subsequent research revealed the effects of head trauma on personality and memory. Those effects succinctly described the arc of my mother’s behavior.

I also realized that my own acceptance of violence against women was a metaphor for society: The violence is just so normalized. 

During her career as a deputy sheriff, Joy often spoke about many of the women who’d been victims of violence, and how they often felt pressured to be so polite that they ignored their own sense of being in danger. She observed that women’s social conditioning caused us to repress our natural instincts, our “safety intuition.” After my moment of clarity, I searched for books that would help women understand how to keep themselves safe; how to recognize predation and abusive patterns before the damage occurs. But to my surprise, there are very few. And even more surprisingly, even fewer authored by women. So, Joy and I decided to write our own and to codify what both of us knew: A book about violence against women, by women for women. 

In the meanwhile, life had other plans. A few months after we started writing, Joy’s sister, Mindy, was diagnosed with Frontal-Temporal Dementia (FTD), a progressive, neurological brain disease that not only affects physical movement but also decision making. Subsequently, she was also found to be suffering from second progressive neurological disease: ALS. Tragically. FTD and ALS fuel each other. So, we moved from Florida to Mindy’s house in Boston to care for her. 

We wanted our book to be more than a book about cop stories and domestic violence, and we wanted women to know how they could do some things differently to avoid violent occurrences. So, while Joy was involved with Mindy’s care, I did a tremendous amount of research to supplement our experiences. I also joined a writing group, and their support was tremendously helpful in keeping focus on the book when so much was going on in our daily lives with Mindy. 

Joy’s sister sadly but mercifully passed away. But maintaining Mindy’s affairs and care was a full-time job for Joy for over two years. In the meanwhile, I kept writing. 

When Joy could finally turn her attention back to the book, I proudly showed her what I’d written. To my utter surprise, it turned out that the intersection of what I’d heard of Joy’s experience on the street and the actuality according to Joy was a much smaller version than what I’d envisioned. In fact, you could say that it was nonexistent. 

At that point, the fun really started. I’d envisioned that Joy would be overwhelmed by my masterful writing and recall of events and would happily sign off on my hard work. But the reality was as cold and biting as you can imagine a cop would be when confronted once again with a false narrative of events. This time, not by a scamming perp, but by her wife with an active imagination. And it turned out that there was not much difference between the two when confronted by facts.

We agreed on virtually…nothing. From the content to be included, to my insistence on long narratives. Everything was up for grabs and I couldn’t have been more stunned…and disappointed. I thought that Joy would recognize my writing brilliance and just sign off. And what about all my hard work? All for naught. The cop was after hard, cold facts and nothing more. Could the book (and the marriage) be saved? 

Our saving grace was that we both wanted was best for the reader. In the end, we acknowledged that we had a common goal: How we could best serve women who wanted to be safe, irrespective of our personal opinions. So, we agreed to let the writer’s group and our developmental editor decide. We submitted chapter after chapter to the group and they unknowingly became our judge and jury. And the best of both of us rose to the surface.

We both believe that in challenging each other every step of the way, the reader was the clear winner. And neither of us would have it any other way.

—

Laura Frombach was introduced to technology in the U.S. Army working on Pershing nuclear missiles. Having spent much of her career as a technologist and engineer with IBM, HP, FedEx, Coca Cola Enterprises, Lenovo and others. A turning point in Laura’s life was the ‘aha’ moment when she correlated her mother’s mental illness to domestic violence. She is now the co-author of Street Smart Safety for Women: Your Guide to Defensive Living (Health Communications Inc, an imprint of Simon & Schuster / October 3, 2023 / $17.95) and advocates for local domestic violence shelters. Laura was one of the featured speakers at the TEDx Eustis conference and speaks on women’s safety. Laura is an avid reader and fitness enthusiast, loves comedy and spiritual topics (not in that order, just in case…). She has been working on personal growth since the sixth grade.

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing