Who hasn’t dreamed of chucking it all, assuming a new identity and starting over?

Karen Palmer didn’t dream it, she lived it, except her experience — or at least the impetus of it — was a nightmare she writes about in her memoir “She’s Under Here.”

In 1989, Palmer, her new husband and two daughters from a previous marriage entered what she refers to as a “do-it-yourself witness protection program.” They sold most of their belongings, left behind whatever they couldn’t pack up, and fled: “Driving east out of California, we decided on our new names … Hidden under the driver’s seat was a guidebook on how to create new identities, but it couldn’t tell us who we’d be."

It was that “previous marriage” that propelled the family to leave everything they’d known. Seeing no way to handle her abusive first husband, who continually harassed her, telling her at one point that he’d cut off her head “and stick it in the refrigerator for the girls to find,” Palmer took what she believed was the only avenue open to her and her family.

She admits that running away might be her thing; she used her first husband to escape her childhood home, after all (she was a teen when she hooked up with him, a much older man). But when he does the unthinkable (no spoilers here), her hand is forced. She must act.

Palmer doesn’t start at the beginning. She dumps the reader into the thick of the situation, her descriptions visceral, the fear real, as she negotiates life on the run. Once she gets to a semblance of safety, she backtracks and fills in details about how she met her first husband, how the violence began. She goes back even further, cluing us in on her childhood and her reasons for the choices she made.

It’s true that we don’t get the first husband’s side of things in “She’s Under Here.” Palmer can’t provide that context without inviting back into her life the violence she is trying to avoid.

So she offers the point of view of family members: Palmer’s mother was never happy with her choice of spouse the first time around, and her second husband, a former friend of the first, witnessed the brutish behavior. The difficulty of a true portrait, she finds, is her first husband’s two-sided nature. He could be very charming when necessary, undermining any attempts to get help from law enforcement — or even her own lawyer.

Throughout the harrowing “She’s Under Here,” Palmer asks herself what makes a mother, ruminating on whether stealing her own children was the right thing to do. For her, solid answers are elusive (maybe not so much for the reader). She aims the reckoning of the subtitle, “A Love Story, a Horror Story, a Reckoning,” at the situation, but also at herself.

Where she lands and how she gets there makes for truly compelling reading.

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She’s Under Here

By: Karen Palmer.

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 247 pages.

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