Submerged Truths: A Deep Dive into Boo Trundle's The Daughter Ship
Navigating the Complex Currents of Memory and Survival
"
I finished The Daughter Ship and immediately wished I had written it—but the truth is, I couldn’t have. Not like Boo Trundle. Her sentences are splinters: sharp, glinting, lodged beneath the skin. This novel is both forensic and elliptical—a work of survival, of satire, of spiritual excavation. It’s about trauma and marriage and parenting, yes. But more precisely, it’s about how we carry unspoken histories. How we keep going, even when we’re underwater.
Truitt, Star, and Smooshed Bug. Three inner children. Three voices trying to steer the life of a grown woman, Katherine. I recognized them immediately. I, too, am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse—ten years of unrelenting harm at the hands of a Catholic priest who lived as my mother’s partner and assumed the role of my father. I’ve splintered, compartmentalized, dissociated, just to stay alive. My trauma is more chronologically linear, but no less fragmented. Different parts of me—Little Jo, Runaway Jo, and Young Adult Jo—hold separate pieces of the truth. Trundle captures that experience with precision and grace.
What she gets so right—and it’s a rare thing—is that these selves aren’t metaphors. They are real, they are chaotic, they are sometimes the only ones who know what to do. Trundle doesn’t sentimentalize or tidy them up. She gives them space to be as strange and relentless as trauma actually is.
Katherine’s memories of abuse arrive murky, like waterlogged film reels playing in a submarine submerged—fragments and flotsam drifting past, too distorted to grasp, too familiar to ignore. She doesn’t feel horror. Not at first. She feels confusion, shame, and a kind of aching familiarity. Is it true? Is it something she can joke about—make funny? It’s not the clarity of a crime remembered—it’s the ache of something submerged. The metaphor of the submarine—the vessel of her own submerged truth—is genius. So much of survival is about what we forget just enough to function.
But this is also where Trundle’s work gets even more profound. In portraying the complex relationship of father-daughter incest, she shows how deeply the child internalizes blame. When Katherine says, "I seduced him", I felt myself recoil—and contend. A child cannot seduce a loving, mature, ethical adult. Full stop. As Judith Herman writes in Father-Daughter Incest, “There is nothing subtle about the power relations between adults and children. Adults have more power than children. This is an immutable biological fact. Children are essentially a captive population, totally dependent on their parents or other adults for their basic needs. Thus they will do whatever they perceive to be necessary to preserve a relationship with their caretakers. If an adult insists upon a sexual relationship with a dependent child, the child will comply.”
And that’s exactly what Trundle makes visible. Katherine isn’t a passive victim—she’s a woman trying to reconcile what happened with the way it happened, the way she survived. And survival, as we know, is never clean.
But where The Daughter Ship really surprised me was in the second silence: the mother. Katherine’s mother is present in the background, yet nearly absent. She is the one who stays home. Drinks wine out of a measuring cup. Tries to control her intake—until the control slips. “Mom stayed home and measured out her wine in a measuring cup before pouring it into a glass. She always forgot, after two cups, to measure. Then she drank the whole box.” It’s such a small detail, but such a loud omission. Her mother is anesthetized—checked out. A kind of quiet complicity. We never know what she knows, but we feel the weight of her absence. Whether she’s drinking to unknow, or drinking because she doesn’t care, we don’t know. That ambiguity is itself the echo of too many real lives.
As someone who has grappled with the idea of the complicit mother, this silence was chillingly familiar. It takes years to process what it means when your mother knew, or should have known, and did nothing. When she let it happen. When she needed you to pretend, to maintain the appearance of a functional home. In my own work I’ve written: “She didn’t stop him. She let it happen. And that is the deepest injury. That is the thing that does not heal.” Trundle captures this, too—not with confrontation, but avoidance. Katherine pulls away from her mother as the memories surface, and that avoidance is its own reckoning. A daughter’s silence toward her mother is sometimes the only way she can survive what was never spoken.
And then there’s the marriage. Katherine and Phil. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more accurate depiction of what it’s like to love, or be loved by, someone with a trauma history. Phil is kind. Present. Then not. He’s learned to flatten his responses, to filter Katherine’s volatility through a sieve of disbelief. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that caring too much would collapse the day. He doesn’t believe she’ll hurt herself. He believes in the children more. And when Katherine leaves him, it’s not dramatic—it’s devastating in its ordinariness. And yet—the Smooshed Bug in me still hopes. Still hopes Katherine can return to him in a healed form, and that Phil might still be there, waiting.
On page 197, there’s a passage that nearly took the breath out of me:
“He was my dad.. He made decisions about my life. He drove me around, fed me, paid for my school, gave me a car. And I seduced him. I was too pretty. I looked like him. I manipulated him. I loved him. I was too trusting. I'm a bad person. I liked it! He made me feel special. I was warm, soft, sweet, beautiful. I had brown eyes and long thin fingers. I am a cocksucker. Love will never find me.”
This is the voice of internalized shame. Of a child’s confusion rewritten by an adult mind trying, and failing, to reason through what never made sense. It reminded me of Junot Díaz’s essay, The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma, when he asks: Why did I keep going back? Why did I get an erection? Why didn’t I tell anyone? These are not failures. They are the mechanics of survival.
The Daughter Ship doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t promise. But it does something better—it trusts the reader. It trusts the inner children. That final moment, when Katherine asks, “But where am I going?” and they answer, “We’ll take care of that. Go!”—that’s hope. The kind of hope that whispers: Just keep going.
And then there’s the form. Trundle constructed this novel using cut-ups—sampling text from fairytales, internet chat rooms, operating manuals, war novels and other sources. Fragments stitched into something whole. Of course she did. That’s what survivors do. They gather the shards. They write their way toward coherence. They make a vessel out of what was broken.
This book floored me—not because it resolved anything, but because it didn’t try to. The metaphor made the story accessible, bearable. Survivors will see themselves in the fragments, in the girls, in Katherine’s hesitations. What Trundle offers is not wholeness, but movement. A step. A gesture toward integration. And maybe, if we’re lucky, toward freedom.
