was challenging, confronting and nasty. I feel more than a little sick, and my heart aches.
As I have often said, memoirs, diaries, biographies are always on my go-to list.
I picked this one up for two reasons: because of my curiosity about other people's lives; and as an education.
It looks innocent enough doesn't it? Wrong, wrong and wrong. This is definitely a book which shouldn't be judged by it's cover.
Many of you know that I volunteer on a telephone crisis line. I take it very seriously, and am constantly trying to improve.. Which means reading, studying, listening and learning about subjects I don't know a lot/enough about, even when they are distasteful. Sometimes a different perspective will open my eyes, heart and mind and help me reach and connect with our callers better.
Distasteful is an understatement here. The author was in a fifteen year relationship with a man forty-four years older than her. A relationship which started when she was seven.
'We were friends, soul mates and lovers.'
'I still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time'...
'They were the happiest days of my life.'
Nothing has ever brought home the horrors and the life-long damage of paedophilia to me more than this book. Nothing. And her perspective came as a powerful punch to my gut.
She is free of him now - he died by suicide. She has a husband and a daughter of her own. A daughter she is working tirelessly to ensure doesn't go through what she went through and that the tradition of child abuse which ran through her mother's family and to her is stopped.
And yet, and yet... Even though she is now safe from a man we learnt (confirming my early suspicions) was a serial abuser of young girls, abusing his daughters, foster children, as well as the author (and quite possibly also abusing boys) she still considers her time with him the happiest days of her life. Words fail me. Emotions fail me - and this book will haunt me.
As it should.
It turned my assumptions on their head. I hope (so much) that very few people feel as she does - but I had never considered that anyone could. However reluctantly, and despite not liking what I discovered, I have learned something.
As I have often said, memoirs, diaries, biographies are always on my go-to list.
I picked this one up for two reasons: because of my curiosity about other people's lives; and as an education.
It looks innocent enough doesn't it? Wrong, wrong and wrong. This is definitely a book which shouldn't be judged by it's cover.
Many of you know that I volunteer on a telephone crisis line. I take it very seriously, and am constantly trying to improve.. Which means reading, studying, listening and learning about subjects I don't know a lot/enough about, even when they are distasteful. Sometimes a different perspective will open my eyes, heart and mind and help me reach and connect with our callers better.
Distasteful is an understatement here. The author was in a fifteen year relationship with a man forty-four years older than her. A relationship which started when she was seven.
'We were friends, soul mates and lovers.'
'I still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time'...
'They were the happiest days of my life.'
Nothing has ever brought home the horrors and the life-long damage of paedophilia to me more than this book. Nothing. And her perspective came as a powerful punch to my gut.
She is free of him now - he died by suicide. She has a husband and a daughter of her own. A daughter she is working tirelessly to ensure doesn't go through what she went through and that the tradition of child abuse which ran through her mother's family and to her is stopped.
And yet, and yet... Even though she is now safe from a man we learnt (confirming my early suspicions) was a serial abuser of young girls, abusing his daughters, foster children, as well as the author (and quite possibly also abusing boys) she still considers her time with him the happiest days of her life. Words fail me. Emotions fail me - and this book will haunt me.
As it should.
It turned my assumptions on their head. I hope (so much) that very few people feel as she does - but I had never considered that anyone could. However reluctantly, and despite not liking what I discovered, I have learned something.
