Life Stories #91: Danielle Trussoni

I spoke to Danielle Trussoni about her second memoir, The Fortress, in late 2016, just a few days after the news had broken about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marriage falling apart. The timing was apt, given that Trussoni's book detailed how, in a desperate bid to save her own marriage, she took the windfall she'd earned from her first novel and moved with her husband and two children to a medieval fortress in the middle of France. Spoiler alert: Moving to the other side of the world doesn't actually put everything that's gone wrong behind you.. When I mentioned to Trussoni that her husband's treatment of her read like blatant gaslighting, she told me that she'd never actually heard that term until after she escaped her marriage—to me, that was an important reminder of how easy it can be to find oneself in a relationship this destructive. She also observed that after a childhood shaped by her father's intense PTSD, she was used to and perhaps even attracted to turbulence and drama... and, too, conditioned to sort out her problems on her own, not showing even those closest to her how bad things had gotten and how much she needed help.