“Keisner debuts with a riveting essay collection that revisits her painful past…The essays attack difficult material straight on, but Keisner’s smart, clear, and incisive writing cuts deep.”—Publisher’s Weekly

In Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner searches for the roots of violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class Midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters.

Fear is a profound and personal experience, but we all share a common fear: that we or our children and loved ones will be hurt. We know that fear, like pain, is inevitable, yet we hope it away. Or we confront it. Does fearing keep us safe or make us weak? What—or who—should we fear? We build barriers between us and our fears, and then we wonder: will they be enough? Growing up in rural towns in Nebraska, Keisner is raised by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she begins a nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she’s afraid of finding. An intruder? A monster? Her father?

Now a wife and mother, her fears have matured and the boogeyman under the bed has shape-shifted, though its shapes are no less frightening—a young aunt’s drowning, the “chest chomp” in the classic horror movie The Thing, a diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune disease, the murder of a young college student, an eccentric grandmother’s belief in reincarnation and her dying advice: “Don’t be afraid.”

In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.

University of Nebraska Press, American Lives Series, September 1, 2022