How to Vanish Into Thin Air
When Karen Palmer met Gil, he was 36, a father of three, and a petty criminal who liked to show off his multiple driver’s licenses in various names. Palmer was 17, already grieving a major loss, and had a thing for “slinky-hipped delinquents who could teach me something,” she writes. “Sometimes I think I married him just to prove that I could.” They were together 14 years. “Things changed,” Palmer writes. “Slowly at first, then all at once.”
Gil (not his real name) pressed a loaded gun to her pregnant belly; he locked her in a closet; he pinned her to the living-room floor and gagged her with a sock when he wanted sex. They had two children. When Palmer finally left him for her longtime friend Vinnie, Gil began stalking her. “The prospect of violence excited him,” Palmer writes. “He threatened to shoot Vinnie. He threatened to shoot me. He told me he’d cut off my head and stick it in the refrigerator for the girls to find. And then, months into our separation, he kidnapped our younger child.” Gil moved 3-year-old Amy from hotel to hotel, cutting her hair short and dyeing it to disguise her. A judge granted Palmer full custody, and when Gil finally returned her little girl, Palmer ran.
With her daughters buckled into the back and a guidebook on how to disappear tucked beneath the driver’s seat, Palmer and Vinnie drove a car they’d bought with cash from California to Colorado. Twelve hundred miles away from Gil, Palmer used X-Acto knives, rubber cement, and a mail-order counterfeit State of New York seal to forge new birth certificates — and with them, a new life.
“You could never do it now,” she told me over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles this week. She did it in 1989: one year before California passed the nation’s first anti-stalking law, a full five years before domestic violence would be recognized as a federal crime. “I went into Social Security with my fake documentation, and I said to them, ‘I took up with a man when I was still a teenager, and I’ve never worked. We broke up, and now I have to get a job,’” Palmer said. It was a lie. “They didn’t question it for even one second.” The office issued her a new Social Security number and a new one for Vinnie, too. For two decades, Palmer, Vinnie, and her children lived on falsified documents and fake names. Her memoir, She’s Under Here, is out this week. I’ve never disappeared myself, but I understood much of Palmer’s story on a personal level. I couldn’t wait to talk to her about the book, which is crafted with the care of a fiction writer and teacher, both of which Palmer is.
Your book is full of disappearances. There’s the big one, of course, which you orchestrate yourself. But long before that, your parents “disappear” you because you’re 16 and pregnant. They send you to a Catholic maternity home that is the same place your birth mother delivered you before she disappeared from your life. And you live there until your baby is born, whom you’re also expected to give away in a closed adoption. How do you think about the fact that twice you were displaced from your life, your home, your community, while the men — the boy who got you pregnant and then later your ex-husband, Gil — were allowed to go on living their lives?
The idea of having disappeared before — I think it prepared me in some way. I was used to not being able to be in the world as I was. I couldn’t be 16 and pregnant and be a mother and have the baby. So everything had to be hidden. That estranged me from my parents and made it easier to go away eventually, permanently.
When my ex-husband, in a rage, burned all my photographs, he burned the stuff my mother had given me that were old family photographs of her family growing up in New York and of my father when he was a child. Even though they weren’t blood relatives, they were my people. And then he got rid of them, which was heartbreaking, but it was a preview of what it means to leave everything behind.
I’m also a parent, I also write about escaping domestic violence, and even so many years later, I still feel like I’m airing our dirty laundry. I feel like I’m betraying my ex. I think all the time about how I would feel if he were writing about me. I guess I’m sort of uncomfortable with my own power as the one telling the story.
That’s part of the reason it took me so long to write it. I kept putting it aside, partly because I didn’t know how to tell it and partly because I felt weird about just exactly what you say: airing the dirty laundry.
What do you mean by “I didn’t know how to tell it”? Do you mean in terms of craft? Or in how to position your own morality, the ethics of it?
All those things. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. I had the situation. All this stuff had happened to me, and it was very, very dramatic. But what I didn’t have was what the story meant. What eventually, kind of late in the process, occurred to me was that what happens after we disappear is just as important as the stuff that happens before. And the story rested on this idea of, If you do something like this, are you a good person? How do you know who you are if you take away a man’s children?
To this day, I still dream about him. I have both fear dreams and empathetic dreams. I loved that man for a very long time, and that doesn’t go away.
Displacing — and sometimes disappearing — women and children is really foundational to our domestic-violence response in this country. At a minimum, victims are expected to leave their homes, and if they don’t, if they stand their ground, a lot of times police and courts don’t find their fear credible.
Exactly.
And then we hide women and children in secret shelters, which often requires them to totally abandon everything that’s familiar — pets, school routines, jobs, community. Is there another way?
I know we’re both familiar with Rachel Louise Snyder’s book No Visible Bruises, and she spends a fair amount of time in that book talking about other ways — ways men who do this can be rehabilitated and families can, under the right circumstances, be reunited. I don’t have a lot of faith in that. Maybe that’s completely cynical of me. Something that happens a lot in the courts is, in order to preserve the father’s parental rights, he’s given visitation and sometimes complete shared custody of the children. The court’s attitude is “Well, he’s angry at the wife, he’s mad at her, he doesn’t like her, he maybe even hates her, but he’s a good father.” And I cannot reconcile the idea that someone would hurt their children’s mother; that to me is disqualifying for being a good father. Complete rehabilitation, remorse, restitution of some kind, acknowledgment of wrongdoing — that is the only way.
Last week, the president said a man having “a little fight with the wife” shouldn’t be considered a crime. Do you feel your story is a result of police inaction, of officers not taking the problem seriously?
They absolutely did not take it seriously. A lot of it was “Well, divorces are hard. He’ll get over it. Just relax, and he’ll be fine.” Some men, I assume, do get over it. But my ex absolutely did not, and he only escalated. I tried for more than a year after I moved 90 miles away from him to have a normal divorce, to have a situation where he could see the kids, but he had to leave me alone. And he just wouldn’t do that.
Would you tell the story about the dynamite and how the police responded?
I was living in Santa Cruz, and my mom was down near San Diego. I went to visit her with the kids, and on the way back, I stopped to see my boyfriend in Los Angeles. We stayed a couple of nights at his apartment, and the morning the girls and I were due to leave, we came downstairs and on his truck — which was parked directly beneath the apartment — were sticks of dynamite bound together with a rubber band, with a cigar that was cut up and put on the end of the fuse. The cigar had a half-inch of ash, so it had been lit. I imagine what happened was my ex put this on there, he lit it, and then he ran because he didn’t want to be there when it went off. And then, for whatever reason, it burned out.
The police station was just around the corner, and they came over — they came sauntering up — and they looked at it, and they were like, “Well, how do you know he did it?” And then it was like, “You could have put it on there because you want to make him look bad.” They wouldn’t take fingerprints. They were very, very casual about the whole thing. One of them even laughed and said, “Boy, that’s enough to blow up the whole building if it had gone off.” And that was the end of it. The girls were up there — his children were in that apartment.
We really did feel like we were completely on our own, that nobody was going to help us. It’s like the president saying, “Oh, it’s just a little fight.” Certain men have this idea — and a lot of them are in law enforcement — that, It’s a domestic situation, and we don’t interfere. It’s just couples scrapping. There’s no more to it than that. Even my own attorney said at one point, “Gil’s a nice guy.”
I’ve had a lawyer say the same thing to me about my ex.
What do you say to that? There’s no comeback.
Do you think a judge would have allowed you to move your kids out of California if you’d asked permission?
I honestly don’t know. Gil never got an attorney. He never showed up to a single hearing. What it did for me was show that he wasn’t going to be governed by anything legal or law enforcement. That he would enforce his will regardless of what any court said.
What was the hardest part of this book to write?
Giving up the baby, the kidnapping, all that stuff was hard to write. But actually, the hardest part was the chapter that covers the 14 years my ex and I were together. That was one of the last things I wrote because I didn’t know how to convey that it was just ordinary life. We would have some kind of dramatic incident and then four months would go by, and we’d have dinner and take the kids to school, and everything was mostly normal. Conveying what that felt like was just really difficult.
And so crucial for communicating what the experience of living in this kind of relationship is like to someone who has not lived in it. Because if the reader gets only the worst parts, they think —
Why didn’t you leave immediately?
Right. Four months can go by, and it just feels like you’re a husband and a wife with two kids like anyone else. There’s a lot of time to tell yourself a story, to put aside whatever really bad has happened before the next really bad thing happens.
The arc of that chapter, which isn’t actually completed until two chapters later with the section where he locks me in the closet, is going from being infatuated with this man to realizing, first, that he doesn’t love me and, more important, that I don’t love him anymore. Falling out of love is the thing that let me leave, rather than the individual instances of these terrifying experiences.
Yeah, absolutely. It was me starting to fall in love with someone else that let me leave. I don’t want that to be true. I want to believe that I would have left without somebody else standing there to be my partner, but I don’t know if I would have.
Me too.
Having someone else I was starting to love, who adored me, that was the door out. But it also made my ex very crazy, and that was probably when I was in the greatest danger, just like you were.
They always say that as soon as you leave, you’re in the greatest danger, particularly if you’ve left for someone else. Then you’re really, really in the soup.
I never thought I’d be the kind of person to have a man waiting in the wings, and it was very embarrassing to write. But I felt it was crucial because it was the truth. I might not have left. Maybe I would have stayed forever. Who knows?
We have this cultural obsession with true crime, and it often turns gender-based violence into very pulpy entertainment. Are you concerned about your story being received that way?
Yes. When I read the few things that have been written about it already, with some of them I don’t recognize what they’re writing about because it turns into this pulpy thing. It also turns into this kind of sob story, victim-y, she had an affair. She’s a cheating woman, and her husband came after her.
I wanted to write a serious book, and I wanted to write a book that was artful. The prose was important to me. The sensational aspects of the story give people a hook to talk about it and then sometimes that overwhelms the other elements.
The true-crime machine can be so invasive.
The comments on the Daily Mail article were all like, “You’re lucky your husband didn’t kill you.” Those kinds of comments: “Well, you cheated, what did you expect?”
The repetition of the violence from the story is now in the comments. It’s so predictable.
Especially now because something has been let loose in the world that is a very ugly force.
Would you be interested in your story being adapted for the screen?
Sure. I mean, obviously, I would be particularly happy if they did it with nuance. I don’t want a false empowerment narrative.
What do you mean by that?
The epigraph of the book is that line from The Sopranos where Uncle Junior says to Tony, “Don’t be so fuckin’ smart. Things could have gone the other way, my little nephew.” I always felt like my story could have gone either way. Yes, I did a lot to get out, but to call it empowering — I didn’t look at it that way. It was just survival. That’s all. Just pure survival. I didn’t feel powerful, and I didn’t feel like I’d won.
And you would rather have not had to survive something, right?
Right. It’s not in the book so much because, you know, you can’t put everything in there, but for that year, I really tried to get Gil to see the benefits of being a normal divorced father, being able to see his children and have a life again. The irony of it is he cheated on me constantly. His cheating made me think, Well, he’ll find somebody else, you know? You pray for them to find someone else. Though you wouldn’t wish that on another woman — that’s kind of monstrous.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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