I am responding to Riva's initial post. I agree wholeheartedly. Here is a letter that I wrote that was published in Jewish Action in 2003:

"Kudos to Rabbi Feldman for opening
the door to public conversation regarding the gedolei Yisrael biography genre.

I personally know many people,
myself included, who have been deflated
and confused by the “instant tzaddik”
myth perpetuated in these biographies.

I believe that while these authors
may have been well intentioned, some
of their own subjects would have been
dumbfounded by the Pollyannaish
treatment of their life stories.
Yet, I know of a number of recent
works that have done more justice to
the challenges and emotions of the
great Torah leaders of our past. The
biographies of Rav Samson Raphael
Hirsch and Rav Eliyahu Dessler have
attempted to show their human struggles
as well as their ultimate triumphs.

However, more needs to be done to
teach our future generation that greatness has always been achieved by
growing from our failures."

Yoni Schick: Are you aware that we are talking about fiction and not biographies of gedolim?

as a child suffering from a broken home, i feel that there is some rightness and wrongness to these fictional stories of abusive marriges. although there is sometimes a slight consolation to reading about people coming through these challenges, i beg to ask a question: where is the help for these people in the real world? what does it help to write about it and make people aware and not give them the help so much needed!! i am a young boy, oldest of my family and everything has been ltft on my head due to my parents being so busy creating a mess of their lives and forgetting that there are children that need looking after and bringing up. there are many people in the community very aware of this situation but THEY prefer to 'bury their heads in the sand' and turn a blind eye to it all. not one of my siblings have ever been approached and been offered help, even when one of them is shouting out in every action she does!!! you talk about it all, but where is the help for the people actually going through it in reality? my siblings are 'living orphans'! what will reading a story help?

Riva, I appreciate your apology and I understand that you are sincerely trying to effect a positive change through your writing. However, I feel that a serialized story in a popular magazine is simply not the medium for this type of effort. Honestly, someone who has not been in this situation cannot truly understand it, and certainly no one will gain such an understanding from a story such as yours. Any person who is an abusive situation will need to struggle with and eventually accept the reality of the unhealthiness of the relationship so that she/he can take the steps needed to end or change it. There is usually a particular incident or build-up of incidents that gets this message through, and I don't think that many people are likely to identify themselves in a story and come to this awareness through that. Providing direct education to kallah teachers, seminary girls, rebbetzins, etc. would be a more useful way to raise awareness and help prevent or change abusive marriages than splashing the sordid details across the pages of a magazine. Obviously, no one is forcing me to read the story....but I just wanted to raise these questions.

I too grew up in an abusive home, in my case it was my mother being abusive, not my father. My mother takes every opportunity to control, manipulate, and bash my father and she expects her children to follow her directives to a tee or else. My father has always worked to support his wife and children to the best of his ability, but our house was borderline dysfunctional as my mother did not run the home. From a young age (before Bat Mitzva) I learned to cook, clean, do laundry, and care for my siblings. As an mother I'm very capable and efficient but I never got to be a child, so I'm dealing with that.

Riva when I read charades, I see Gila as also have ing a role in the silent suffereing of her children. She is enabling the abuse by not standing up to it, as difficult as that may be. She is also expecting way to much from Miri, who I strongly identify with (I was her, even more so because it was my mother who was abusive and I had to do way more than she does.) I sometimes wish my father had stood his ground so we wouldn't have gone thru so much.

There were additional comments here, were there not? I'm sorry to see that they were deleted, particularly when people who are in real-life abusive situations have posted their objections to this sort of fictional writing.

I just wanted to reach out to those of you who wrote in that you are in comparable situations. As one of you, I believe we all understand the story in a way that the general readership can not. It is simply my hope, as I have written to you Riva, that this story will not end with a big huge bandaid as if situations like these can always have a beautiful ending if people were only strong enough to walk the proper path.
I wish you all the best of luck. May we all find strength and meaning as we grapple with our real-life situations.