Praise

​"Montgomery grapples with the complexities of being a woman in a patriarchal society . . . pulling back the veil to reveal trauma and injustice . . . Intense, unflinching."

—Kirkus Reviews 

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“Montgomery has built tiny containers that somehow hold all the rage, love, fear, and longing that come with the experience of growing up as a girl.”

—Literary Hub

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“Just being a woman in the world is a provocation—Abbreviate makes this truth rise up from your bones, bare and honest.”

—SmokeLong Quarterly

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“Poetic and impressionistic—a deeply moving coming-of-age story and a powerful critique of American culture.”

—Independent Book Review

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“This is the story of womanhood, gaslit until we almost believe it ourselves . . . Read this book for catharsis.”

—Hippocampus Magazine

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“Montgomery refuses to be silent, her words loud on the page, writing the truth of the casual violence female bodies experience, her voice bigger than the slimness of this book implies.”

—Mom Egg Review

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“Montgomery sensitively and candidly addresses domestic violence, casual intimidation, and sexual assault . . . Abbreviate is a necessary and resonant book.”

—New Pages

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"Early in Abbreviate, Sarah Fawn Montgomery conjures an image of gender as an asteroid. It’s startling, brilliant, hard to forget. Her memoir-in-essays goes on to map the complex orbit of female embodiment, its rituals ('we form a circle around our hunger, another empty bowl'), paradoxes ('you are only something because you are nothing,' 'the trick to feeling alive is to pretend you’re already dead'), and interminable ironies ('they will interrupt to explain to me what I am already telling them'). When an asteroid breaks free from its orbit and enters the earth’s atmosphere as a meteor, it turns incandescent from the friction it has endured. This is a book about breaking old orbits, swerving with insight and outrage at once. Montgomery’s language gleams in every essay, sharp as a blade and finely serrated: 'The stars make a big bear and a small bear, a big dog and a small dog, myth a way of teaching us how the world works.' She is the meteor." 

—Julie Marie Wade, author of The Mary Years 

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"Across each piece in Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate, I found myself tracing one enduring thread, which can be summed up by the opening line of the titular essay—We are reduced, made as small as the letters that now signify ourselves. Repeatedly, young girls and women who have been taught to shrink themselves eventually explode with their knowing. And when they do, they set their surroundings on fire. I fluctuated between helplessness and pent-up rage. I watched these girls and women endure such familiar and painful wrongs. But when I finished, I was left with the heavy reminder that victory for women can wear many masks, can come in the form of direct confrontation, quiet escape, or, sometimes, simple survival." 

—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

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"Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate is a necessary literary immortalization that defies the male gaze through a sharp dissection of societal sexism and feminine self-fashioning. What do popular doll brands, like American Girl and Polly Pocket say about women and young girls? Though the answer is multi-faceted, there’s no denial of the 'blank faces' and formulaic 'Polly hair, Polly smile,' while the subject, the young doll collector may 'shrink.' But what if young women could escape these confines—take up more space—metaphorically dance in the vastness of the skies and galaxies? In unforgettable bite-sized lyric prose, Sarah Fawn Montgomery sincerely and lovingly tackles all the above in this brilliant, intersectional collection. It’s fitting that Montgomery defies traditional gender roles while she defies traditional genre designations, giving us our 'Leos and Kates' in all forms."

—Dorothy Chan, author of Return of the Chinese Femme​