It must be a difficult thing when a family is separated by choices that one makes. It is even worse when that separation of the family is a forced one leaving the victims unaware and ignorant of their loved one's whereabouts. The not knowing of what your family is doing and if they're even living and all right must be so mentally exhausting and consuming that it will eat your from the inside out. You're probably left with as an empty shell, an emotionless being who merely walks about like a zombie not caring about anything or anyone, not even yourself. Now, you're left without your family, ripped from the very center of what was held dearly to you and tossed into a life of degradation and humiliation. You are ordered to do as your captor wishes and you are raped whenever the individual feels like it. This must be an infernal life. This is the life that is created for Offred, the heroine of The Handmaid's Tale. Now that she's succumbed to this way of life, she has to be able to re-build herself from the ground up.
             In the novel, the place that we later find out is called Gilead, because of tragic events that makes a woman not be able to conceive, they make a decree justifying the corralling of women like mere cattle and enslaving them for the sole purpose of impregnating them. The conceived child will become part of the new family and the maid, or handmaid in the story, will be utilized again for the same conclusion. Offred is allowed to tell her story and this is the beginning of her regaining her self-respect, at least in her mind. She at least has the power to record her events and her life, this is one aspect of her life that she can control, her telling her life's story.
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