Red Girl Jumping

RED GIRL JUMPING is a fable-like memoir by Kim Merrill, a New York playwright. It is the
story of Kimberly, a grown woman, and Red Girl, a shard of memory trapped in her mind, who is
also the narrator of this spellbinding story of dissociation and healing.

As Red Girl tells it, her job is to protect Kimberly from her secret of childhood incest. She does
so with mission-like zeal until Kimberly reaches her thirties. Then-to her shame-Red Girl
unleashes a torrent that upends Kimberly's life. When Kimberly is fifty, tired of her pain, she
hauls her diaries up a hill to set them all on fire. Red Girl turns herself to ash and tries to fly
away-but where can memory go?

Ashy Red Girl falls from the sky and re-enters Kimberly's brain. Longing for Kimberly's love,
she hatches a plan to give them peace: "Write how we split in two! Un-fear the invisible heart!"
Kimberly hands it to Red Girl: "You're the one to write this."

Committing to the task, Red Girl summons the occupants of Kimberly's dungeon mind -
including the Laughing Corpse, a hero made of bones who wants to silence them all. In a voice
straddling humor and desperation, she writes of splitting from Kimberly, of un-forgetting, of
losing family, and generates a life-and-death struggle between her loyalty to the Laughing
Corpse and the pull of Kimberly's need to be a unified self.