Book Club: PROUD FLESH by Catherine Simone Gray
Our March 2025 Book Club Selection
On February 25, I had the honor of being in conversation with Catherine Simone Gray at Lemuria Books for the launch of her incredible memoir Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure. The building was packed; the energy was buoyant, loving, celebratory. As evidenced by the palpable love in the room, Catherine is a genuine community builder. Writing is an extension of her impulse for inclusion and trust-building. In Proud Flesh, she unfurls a story so rich with specific and vulnerable details that you can’t help but find yourself reflected back through her prose.
I also got the chance to review Proud Flesh for the Clarion Ledger, which means that my copy of the book is fully highlighted, underlined, and page-marked. Here’s the beginning of the review, which you can read in full on the Mississippi Books Page:
“Are all women made to withstand trauma? Designed to stretch and tear and return to a healthy state? Are women’s bodies geographies of forgiveness?” And: “What happens when survivors become mothers?” These are some of the questions that Catherine Simone Gray poses to her readers—and to herself—in the prologue of her exquisite debut, “Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure.” With lush and enveloping prose, Gray plunges ahead into deep waters, looking for answers in the recesses of the body and of memory.
Lucky for us, Catherine will join the Bottom Reader Book Club on March 27 at 7 p.m. CT. As always, the live book club session is free to all. Paid subscribers will get access to the video recording of our conversation.
Now here’s the official description of the book:
A searing portrait of a mother’s body—a resurrection and reclamation of pleasure after abuse, a study of intergenerational trauma, and a love letter to the bodies of women: as alive and unbound as the teeming Mississippi wilds that bear witness
Four months postpartum with her second child, Catherine Simone Gray is back at her doctor’s office, surveying a childbirth wound that refuses to mend. Proud flesh: tissue that overheals to become its own wound. Pregnancy and motherhood had been physically vulnerable for Gray, but this renders her most intimate parts unrecognizable—like her body is no longer her own. Has it ever been her own?
As she gets to know her body in its new form, she encounters, too, the girl she’d been at seventeen. It was summertime in Mississippi—wild, pulsing with life—when a man coerced her into an abusive relationship that would dominate her life for four years.
Told in parallel timelines, Proud Flesh grapples with the legacy of intimate partner violence in motherhood. With luminous prose and breathtaking viscerality, Gray makes legible the ways that abuse can imprint on our body and seethe undetected for years. She lays bare unspoken truths: that violence remaps how we connect with and care for our children. That the pains of our mothers—and our mothers’ mothers—endure, and can prowl the edges of our stories too. That even amid pain, our bodies can teach us new truths about our capacity to heal and experience pleasure.
Proud Flesh rewrites the body of the mother beyond the borders—bold, defiant, and heart-stoppingly true, it’s an unputdownable memoir and a force of nature.
Catherine Simone Gray is a writer and educator whose writings on her blog Unsilenced Woman have captivated audiences globally of up to 2.5 million. An Emerging Writer in Roxane Gay's The Audacity, Gray has also published essays in The Bitter Southerner and The Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape. She is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship by the Mississippi Arts Commission. Her writings on motherhood has been shared by respected organizations for new mothers, such as La Leche League, International Cesarean Awareness Network, and ImprovingBirth. She has been a guest on The Birth Hour, a #1 podcast in iTunes Kids & Family. She has delivered three addresses at the Mississippi Womanist Rally. With an M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction, she teaches writing classes for women, mothers, and caregivers. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband and their two children.
Thanks again to our book club partners: Mississippi Book Festival, Lemuria Books, and Friendly City Books. Our sponsor RED SQUARED records and produces these discussions at their studio in The Hangar.
Check out our upcoming book club picks!
April: Come By Here with author Neesha Powell-Ingabire
May: No One Gets to Fall Apart with author Sarah LaBrie and moderator John Caleb Grenn
June: Split the Baby with author yours truly, Lauren Rhoades
Read more by Catherine:
La Lune!: a triptych
On Friday night the moon was full, and I knew one thing we needed. Our family piled into the car.
“Where are we going?” my six-year-old asked.
“Into the darkness,” I declared, my voice a solid mythic resin as we exited the highway toward woods on the Natchez Trace. “But you don’t need to be afraid. We’re together and the moon is bright.
I just got to the part where she mentions doing cultural anthropology observations at High Noon Cafe. I laughed out loud -- I am convinced me and my kids were part of her report somewhere.
-- black bean burrito on spelt with dairy cheese, no sour cream; side salad with extra house dressing; lemonade -- Every. Single. Time. -- :)
As always, your book selections bring me delight and joy that I might not otherwise discover. Thank you!