The Lobotomy: Religious Surgery for Wayward Girls

photograph by Kelly Thompson

I taught myself to read at four years old.

Kindergarten.

My teacher announced that our class would be visiting the third-grade classroom before Christmas. She had chosen my classmate David to read to the older children because he could read. Then she asked if there were any other volunteers.

I raised my hand.

“I can read,” I said.

She laughed.

Or perhaps scoffed is the better word.

The idea seemed absurd to her.

“Yes,” I insisted. “I can read.”

She handed me a copy of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas and instructed me to read it aloud on the spot.

The irony was lost on everyone but would not be lost on me later. I had been raised in a religious sect where Christmas was forbidden. We did not celebrate it. We did not have Christmas trees. We did not exchange gifts. Yet there I stood, five years old, holding a book about a holiday I knew only from the outside.

And I read it.

Fluently.

What stays with me is her surprise.

I knew I could read.

She did not.

I doubt my teacher even mentioned it to my parents. My mother did notice my reading ability, my sensitivity, and what she called my insight. But she understood those qualities through the only lens she had. To her, they were signs that I might someday become a worker. That’s what we called preachers in our church. My gifts were not seen as belonging to me. They were evidence of a calling on behalf of the sect we belonged to.

There were no Sunday school classes, no formal religious instruction for children. We were expected to absorb the faith by osmosis, sitting silently in meetings alongside adults.

I had questions about what I was hearing. So many questions.

I asked the elders. Again and again.

“You’re just not willing.”

I was willing.

That was why I was asking.

In 1941, Joseph Kennedy arranged for his daughter Rosemary to have a lobotomy.

Doctors drilled holes in her skull and severed the connections between parts of her brain in the hope of making her more manageable.

The result was catastrophic.

Reading about Rosemary, it seemed to me that what happened to her had happened to me.

Symbolically.

Had I been born in an earlier era, I might have been considered a candidate for lobotomy myself. A troublesome girl. Too curious. Too questioning. Too unwilling to stay within the boundaries prescribed for her.

My mind had nowhere to go.

My intellect was there. No one ever showed me I had one.

In third grade, our teacher assigned a short essay about Groundhog Day. Most of my classmates dutifully wrote a few sentences on their Chief Tablets in thick pencil: “Today is Groundhog Day. The groundhog comes out of his den…”

I wrote eleven pages.

The teacher let me stay in from recess so I could finish.

My story was called The Dancing Groundhog. It was about a young groundhog whose parents forbade her to dance. One day she emerged from her den and danced anyway. A Hollywood agent happened to see her and discovered her talent.

Even now I laugh at the absurdity of it. We did not own a television. I had never met a Hollywood agent.

No one thought to ask where those eleven pages had come from. The teacher made sure they were placed in a big book on a podium in the school entryway. I would love to see the lined paper and the fat pencilled words dancing across it again.

The signs continued.

A book written in fourth grade.

A creative writing award in ninth.

A superior rating for a speech in tenth.

At fifteen, I became fascinated by circles. Endings folded back into beginnings. Causes became effects. Everything seemed connected to everything else.

Excited by my discovery, I told a school counselor about it.

He informed me that someone had already figured that out.

I had arrived at it myself.

That was the point.

In I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth Telling, Emily Rapp Black writes about arriving at a small Midwestern college and discovering, alongside her classmates, the exhilaration of encountering great minds.

Reading that passage, I felt both joy and grief.

Joy for what she found.

Grief for what I never knew existed.

I had little sense that reading was part of an ongoing human conversation stretching across centuries. I had no map. No mentors. No intellectual lineage.

History is filled with women whose gifts were left unrecognized and unnurtured. Vivian Maier spent decades photographing the world while working as a nanny, her remarkable body of work largely unseen during her lifetime. 
She was discovered after she died. Her photographs now hang in museums.
She never saw any of it.

Years later, having left the religion I was raised in, after I got sober, earned my GED, and enrolled in college as a single mother in my early thirties, I took an English literature course. One assignment required us to explicate a poem. I chose Yeats’s The Second Coming.

A few days later, my professor asked me to come to his office.

I was delighted.

Sitting across from him in my stacked heels, Levi 501s, and a short top that exposed my midriff, I answered his questions.

He asked me about the paper, about specific passages, about my interpretations.

Here, at last, was someone interested in what I thought. I was thrilled.

At the end of our conversation, he told me the paper was graduate-level work and compared aspects of my writing to the transcendentalists.

I floated out of his office.

For years, I remembered the encounter as a moment of recognition.

Only later did another possibility occur to me.

The questions that had felt like interest began to look different in retrospect.

What I had taken for admiration was likely suspicion. Faced with a high school dropout, a single mother in Levi’s and stacked heels, he found it difficult to believe I had written the paper myself.

What devastates me now is how eagerly I mistook suspicion for being seen.

This does not make me special. It makes me ordinary.

This is not my story alone.

Girls raised in high-control systems learn to seek answers outside themselves and to mistrust what they know.

What if someone had noticed the child teaching herself to read and recognized not merely intelligence but hunger? What if there had been books chosen with care, conversations that stretched my thinking, mentors who understood what was awakening in me? What if I had grown up believing my questions were signs of life rather than signs of disobedience?

Rosemary Kennedy had what mind she possessed taken from her forever.

She lost her capacity for language, for movement, for the basic architecture of an independent life. She spent the rest of her decades in an institution, and then in a house in Wisconsin, dependent on caregivers for everything a body needs. What was done to her cannot be recovered from. There is no reclaiming a lobotomy. There is no later chapter where she gets her mind back.

I have my mind.

I am writing this sentence with it.

No one drilled holes in the skulls of girls like me. No surgeon severed the connections in our brains. But the pathways leading to our own authority, curiosity, and intellect were denied us.

My mind remained.

It waited for me.

No one had ever introduced me to it.

That is the tragedy.

In my late fifties, after a two-year relapse that interrupted twenty-four years of sobriety, I found my way to a small clubhouse called The Great Reality. A man named Gary D. held meetings there. I began meeting with him regularly.

We talked often about my work. I had built a career as a clinical social worker, work I loved. Workshops were beginning to take shape. I could see a future there. But another possibility refused to leave me.

Writing.

The pull had been with me since childhood. I just wasn’t sure whether I could trust it.

One day I told Gary about a card game called Author. I was six years old when I played it for the first time. I remember deciding then and there that I was going to be an author when I grew up.

I pronounced it “Arther.”

I laughed as I told him the story.

The certainty of children.

The following week I handed Gary a manuscript.

When I saw him again, he walked into the clubhouse carrying it.

Without a word, he threw it onto the coffee table between us.

I stared at him.

Gary was one of the gentlest men I had ever known. A man of few words. Measured. He never raised his voice.

Had I done something wrong?

There was fire in his eyes.

He pointed at the manuscript.

“This,” he said, “is what you were born to do.”

Not long afterward, a friend pointed me toward Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. I enrolled in the Book Project. For the first time, I found myself surrounded by people who cared about books, sentences, and stories the way I did.

About a year after that, my first piece was published in Manifest-Station. Its editor, Jennifer Pastiloff, invited me to attend Writing and the Body, a retreat she led with Lidia Yuknavitch.

By then, I had a manuscript. One of the requirements of the Book Project was to ask an established writer to read it.

I had admired Lidia’s work for years.

I planned to ask her sometime over the weekend if the right moment came.

We were introduced soon after I arrived.

I was in awe.

I had rehearsed what I wanted to say, but standing there, I forgot it.

This was the writer the girl who wrote eleven pages about a dancing groundhog had once dreamed of becoming.

“I have something I’d like to ask you,” I said. “If we get a moment.”

Lidia looked at me.

“Ask me now.”

I told her about the manuscript.

I told her I thought she was the right person to read it.

She looked at me for a long moment.

“I believe you,” she said.

From there, the life I had imagined as a child began to unfold.

The writers whose books had once sat on my bedside table gradually became colleagues and friends.

I had finally found my way into the conversation.

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After I Would Die If I Were You

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One Thing

Introduce a girl to her mind today.

On Repeat

I’m terrified that I might never have met me.

Two Years.

Two years ago this month, I hit Publish on my first Substack post.

I had no idea where it would lead.

Over the past two years we’ve built a community of thousands of readers. We’ve cried together, laughed together, shared kombucha, questioned everything, celebrated recovery, challenged certainty, published remarkable writers in The W(hole), and started gathering every month for Women Are Talking.

Somewhere along the way, this little publication became a home.

This month marks two years.

And, as it happens, I’m 18 paid subscribers away from Substack bestseller status. What that means is perks so I can expand this newsletter in ways that benefit my readers.

So I’d like to celebrate with something I’ve never offered before.

The first 25 new annual paid subscribers through July 31 will receive one of the engraved stones pictured below. It’s meant to be held. To remind you.

There’s nothing wrong with you.

And there never was.

It’s more than my tagline.

It’s what I hope every person who finds their way here eventually comes to know for themselves.

After you become an annual paid subscriber, you’ll receive a welcome email from Substack. Just hit Reply with your mailing address, and I’ll send your stone with my gratitude.

Thank you for walking these first two years with me.

Here’s to whatever comes next.

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Around Here

A few things happening in my little corner of the internet…

• Women Are Talking had a wonderful launch in June. Our next free Zoom salon is Tuesday, July 28, and I’d love to have you there. Watch for details soon.

• One of the essays closest to my heart—one I’ve worked on for years—has been accepted by a literary magazine I have long admired and will be published this week. I can’t wait to share it with you.

• My essay “Taboo” was featured as the #1 pick in Feminist Roundup (June 29 2026). Thanks to curator Mona Mona whose writing and teaching continue to deepen conversations about feminism, philosophy, and critical thought.

• I recently interviewed the author of one of the best books I’ve read in years. The print interview will be published soon. As soon as I know when, I’ll share the details.

• On Saturday, I joined Jodi Sh. Doff and Bridget Young (Black Sheep Mom) on Conversations on Caregiving to talk about parenting children with addiction, as well as our own recovery journeys. It was powerful. Don’t miss this great series with Jodi Sh. Doff ! The next one is August 8 - Caring for elderly & aging parents with Sue Fagalde Lick of Can I Do It Alone & Karen Wesley of I Write the Hard Things.

• In June, I had a wonderful conversation with Meliesa Tigard on my Women Are Talking podcast and livestream. We’re planning an ongoing series together: Women Are Talking: Deconstructing in Real Time with Kelly Thompson and Melissa Tigard.

• The W(HOLE) is currently accepting submissions. If you’d like to submit your work, send it to kellythompsontnwwy@substack.com.

• I’m adding a Books to Read bibliography to my High Control Groups: Resources and Support for Survivors page in the navigation bar on my website. Stay tuned. If you have a book recommendation—or would like your newsletter included—email me at kellythompsontnwwy@substack.com. You can expect thoughtfully curated, vetted resources.

• I’m thrilled to be part of the editorial reader circle for Jim Palmer’s forthcoming book, The Practice of Being Alive. It’s a privilege to be one of the early readers. I’m looking forward to spending time with the manuscript and sharing my thoughts before it goes to press.

  

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Two years ago, I pressed publish for the first time.

My question is, what would be the form of an economy that took the imagination as its model, that was an emanation of the creative spirit? ~ Lewis Hyde

Part of the gift economy here: paid subscriptions help keep Women Are Talking Salons accessible and allow me to pay writers for The W(hole), a section of There’s Nothing Wrong With You.

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