Kettlewell, Caroline

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KETTLEWELL, Caroline

PERSONAL:

Female. Married first husband (divorced); married second husband; children: one son. Education: Williams College, B.A. (cum laude); George Mason University, M.A. (writing).

ADDRESSES:

Home—VA. Agent—c/o Carroll & Graf, 245 West 17th Street, Eleventh Fl., New York, NY 10011-5300. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Freelance writer. Lecturer at conferences and seminars, including American Association for Suicidology. Has appeared as a guest on television and radio programs, including The Diane Rehm Show, New York and Company, and Voices in the Family, and on Philadelphia Public Radio (WHYY).

WRITINGS:

Skin Game: A Cutter's Memoir, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Electric Dreams (nonfiction), Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to anthologies, including Tales out of School: Contemporary Writers on Their Student Years, Beacon Press, 2001; and Reflections on Anthropology: A Four-Field Reader, McGraw-Hill, 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including Washington Post.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author Caroline Kettlewell is perhaps best known for her book Skin Game: A Cutter's Memoir, which tells of her many years as a "cutter"—a self-mutilator who injures him/herself in order to feel calm. Kettlewell "began cutting herself as an adolescent and continued this pattern into her twenties," a Library Journal contributor explained. The bloodletting "allowed her to focus only on the present moment, the certainty of blood and pain," according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Kettlewell declares that cutting into her own skin brought her peace and relief from the chaotic world of adolescence. "Cutters may not have the excuse of art, or the decorative urge as camouflage," remarked Washington Post Book World contributor Wendy Law-Yone, "but on one level cutting, like tattooing, piercing, and such—or even like anorexia, with which it frequently shares its victims—is supposedly about the need to control chaos." When Kettlewell would cut herself, "all the chaos, the sound and fury, the uncertainty and confusion and despair—all of it evaporated in an instant," she stated in an excerpt from her book cited in the American Journal of Psychiatry, "and I was for the moment grounded, coherent, whole."

The chaotic feelings of inadequacy and oppression continued to plague Kettlewell throughout her childhood and into her early adult life. A variety of psychiatric treatments did not change either her problems or her feelings. It was not until Kettlewell's second husband objected to her destructive behavior—on the grounds that, even if it did not hurt her, it did hurt him—that Kettlewell sought and found an effective treatment. "After treatment with an average dose of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor," explained Armando R. Favazza in his American Journal of Psychiatry review, "the anxiety and unhappiness that had clouded and wasted the preceding two decades of her life were lifted." "This superbly articulated, at times almost unbearable story of mental and physical distress," Law-Yone concluded, "is enough to convert the sternest skeptic to the benefits of popular psychopharmacology."

Kettlewell's second book is also nonfiction. Electric Dreams is the true story of a group of students from a poverty-stricken area of North Carolina who convert a conventional car to an environmentally friendly electric vehicle and win a regional competition as a result. "Underdogs from the start," a Kirkus Reviews contributor commented, the students from Northampton East High School join with neighboring school students to convert a damaged Ford Escort into "an electric motor powered by golf cart batteries." "By the time the hardworking team makes it to" the competition, Joanne Wilkinson stated in Booklist, "readers will be awaiting the results on the edge of their seats." "This is essential reading for any serious environmentalist," a Publishers Weekly reviewer declared, "as it makes the case that EVs [electric vehicles] might play even in the conservative South."