It was Thanksgiving, five years ago. My then-boyfriend wanted to invite friends to his home for an intimate holiday celebration. He planned to have the dinner professionally catered but asked if I would make a curry dish to add to the lavish spread. It was our first party together, with me as a cohost at his side. I was excited, eager—nervous. I wanted everything to be perfect. That night, right before his friends arrived, he tried my curry. “It doesn’t taste good,” I remember he told me. His face curdled into a grimace.
I was incredibly hurt by his response—and confused. I had been cooking since I was a child, first for my parents, then in various restaurants during high school and college. As an adult, I reveled in hosting elaborate dinner parties for the people I loved. They always raved about my food. But here was this man I adored, responding to my carefully prepared dish—to me—with disgust. The curry never made it out of the kitchen. Alone at the end of the night, I quietly tipped it into the trash.
Back then, I hadn’t yet recognized that the cruelty about my cooking tracked with other abusive behaviors he demonstrated during our relationship. Like the violence he inflicted during sex: slapping, spitting, choking me. Or the way he criticized my breasts, and the scars on my torso—remnants of a cancer operation, which he said should be fixed with plastic surgery. At every turn, he gaslit me and undermined my confidence.
And it worked. That night in the kitchen, I really believed I had failed him.
Memories of holidays can be loaded with positive or negative associations; memories of abuse during the holidays lodge deeply within the brain and can be reawakened when the season comes around again. Economic stress, increased alcohol and substance consumption, and proximity between abusers and their victims can fuel toxic situations. Isolation adds another combustible element to the mix. And the pandemic-born mass exodus from the workforce has also increased women’s vulnerability and put their kids at higher risk for eventually experiencing violence themselves.
It took time for me to recognize myself in that cycle. In my earliest memory, I am clutching a stuffed bunny as I stand in the living room, crying at the top of my lungs, while my father—towering over my mother by almost a foot—raises his arms. Decades later, I can vividly recall him beating her. I never imagined it could happen to me too. Except, of course, it did.
Months after the curry incident, a friend who is like my sister sensed that something was wrong. I wasn’t myself, she observed over the phone, probing gently toward the truth. Slowly, I confessed that things had been rocky in my relationship, describing my boyfriend’s excessive drinking and controlling behavior. When she asked a question that stopped me in my tracks with its directness—“Does he hit you?”—the reality snapped into clarity. “Yes, he did,” I told her.
Until that moment, I hadn’t disclosed the physical violence to anyone, but somehow my friend broke through. I felt as if scales were being removed from my eyes. Understanding that I needed more than a sympathetic listener, she helped connect me with a domestic violence expert who helped me extricate myself. I would later discover that I was part of a pattern: My boyfriend had hurt other intimate partners before me too.
Today, those disturbing details are part of the public record. A year after the curry incident, I was home in Portland, Oregon, when I decided to speak about my relationship with Eric Schneiderman, the former attorney general of New York state, in an investigative story by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, of the New Yorker magazine. Ultimately, he resigned and tumbled from public esteem, but my aim in speaking out was simple: I wanted to prevent him from harming other women. And I wanted to spare other women from the painful memories I carry to this day.
There are things I wish I had known before, that I wish I could say to those silently enduring what I went through. That telling someone will help. That it’s okay to feel traumatized, but you have nothing to be ashamed of. That you shouldn’t focus on what will happen to your abuser. And that if your partner is not willing to acknowledge the problem and get professional help, get away. That you deserve better than this.
This holiday season, an old friend recently asked me to bring a dessert for a party at his house: a dish I used to make in college for a weekly salon he and I cohosted at our dorm. The Indian treat is called gulab jamun, but we referred to them as “love balls” on the salon’s menu—they’re essentially warm doughnut holes submerged in a cardamom rose syrup. I hadn’t made it in years. I was excited, eager, and yes, nervous, as I cooked. At the party, my friend popped one into his mouth and grinned. I’ll be joining him for Christmas at his place soon, where he’s hosting loved ones.
He’s already asked me to make the recipe again.
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