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rushthatspeaksThis is a very frank memoir about the experience of long-term childhood sexual abuse. It is also quite a good book, and one I have not seen before.
The sexual abuse memoir is an established genre: there are a lot of them. The question with any given one is whether the reader reaction will tend towards empathy or towards voyeurism, and the answer to that question in any given instance is based not only on differences between books but on differences between readers. Therefore critical response to sexual abuse memoirs is difficult-- these works are based on real, felt pain, which is not a thing a critic is entitled to artistically judge, but at the same time a reviewer wants to communicate whether they feel the book will wind up being an empathic experience for the majority of readers or whether it will be more along the horror-movie line. But there really isn't much way for a critic to tell, beyond how it affects them personally. So one of the major rubrics, beyond prose quality, is: have we seen this book before? How much does it look like the rest of its genre? The more it looks like the rest of its genre, the more likely readers are to have already-formed responses to it, and the more likely it is to be a voyeuristic experience for more people.
I don't know whether this is a reasonable rubric to determine the quality of anything. It's just the one most reviewers use, for lack of something better.
So that's why I led this off by telling you I have read nothing like this book. Which means you are more likely to find it more genuinely upsetting than most memoirs of sexual abuse, since I don't think there actually is anything else like it out there.
But this very difference is part of what makes it valuable, and part of why I suggest people read it.
Fragoso's relationship with her abuser, a man she met by chance at a swimming pool, lasted fourteen years. At the beginning she was eight and he was fifty. He committed suicide when she was twenty-two.
The thing this book portrays incredibly well is the way that any two people who know each other for a long period of time will develop something between them that is complicated and ambiguous. She loved him very much, and spoke private wedding vows with him shortly after her fourteenth birthday. She also very badly wanted to kill him. He spent years trying to find medications that would stop his pedophilia, and eventually did end their sexual relationship. Of course, he also spent years emotionally blackmailing her into that sexual relationship in the first place.
It can't be said that he was an unequivocally bad influence in her life, either, although the reasons why are bitterly ironic: her own father was physically abusive. Her abuser was the person who kept telling her it was not okay for anyone to hit her or otherwise control her body (and indeed his own violence was emotional). Her father kept telling her that he didn't like her abuser because the guy wouldn't go drinking with him, which meant there had to be something creepy going on. The combination of wrong for the right reasons and right for the wrong reasons is tragic.
The other thing this book shows very clearly is the way that a community can just overlook what is going on sometimes. Fragoso's mother was mentally ill, had been abused herself, couldn't suss out trouble-- but the abuser spent time in jail during their acquaintance for abusing his foster children, the entire neighborhood seems to have yelled things at Fragoso from street corners, people kept coming up to her father and asking what was going on-- and it took until she was sixteen for a social worker to look into it.
At which point of course Fragoso denied everything, in an exchange that makes me wince: You have to protect other kids from him, the social worker says. I am, she thinks, by staying with him now. The social worker asks the abuser very pointedly if he has ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome, but can't find enough evidence to press charges.
And this particular knot of things, love and pain and fear and mutual somewhat-chosen self-destruction and no one ever quite noticing, the way that long-term sexual abuse as a child can be both the thing that is ravaging a child and at the same time the thing the child clings to to stop the ravaging and that that clinging is not ineffective-- that's what I haven't seen before in a book. That's what I think it's valuable people know about.
That's the way this book reflects the truth in ways I haven't seen before. Because this book is telling the truth, hard truths, I can assure you of its truthfulness. It wasn't fourteen years for me, it was twelve, and it wasn't anything like so often; but this is absolutely emotionally accurate, from beginning to end.
Including the fact that Fragoso has gone on to get married happily, have a child she appears to be raising well, get a Ph.D in English and go on with her life as a functional human being. Because that's true, too, that happens, people heal, and again that isn't something one sees in this kind of memoir, very much.
Therefore, although it is not an easy read, I do recommend this. It is not badly written, either.
The sexual abuse memoir is an established genre: there are a lot of them. The question with any given one is whether the reader reaction will tend towards empathy or towards voyeurism, and the answer to that question in any given instance is based not only on differences between books but on differences between readers. Therefore critical response to sexual abuse memoirs is difficult-- these works are based on real, felt pain, which is not a thing a critic is entitled to artistically judge, but at the same time a reviewer wants to communicate whether they feel the book will wind up being an empathic experience for the majority of readers or whether it will be more along the horror-movie line. But there really isn't much way for a critic to tell, beyond how it affects them personally. So one of the major rubrics, beyond prose quality, is: have we seen this book before? How much does it look like the rest of its genre? The more it looks like the rest of its genre, the more likely readers are to have already-formed responses to it, and the more likely it is to be a voyeuristic experience for more people.
I don't know whether this is a reasonable rubric to determine the quality of anything. It's just the one most reviewers use, for lack of something better.
So that's why I led this off by telling you I have read nothing like this book. Which means you are more likely to find it more genuinely upsetting than most memoirs of sexual abuse, since I don't think there actually is anything else like it out there.
But this very difference is part of what makes it valuable, and part of why I suggest people read it.
Fragoso's relationship with her abuser, a man she met by chance at a swimming pool, lasted fourteen years. At the beginning she was eight and he was fifty. He committed suicide when she was twenty-two.
The thing this book portrays incredibly well is the way that any two people who know each other for a long period of time will develop something between them that is complicated and ambiguous. She loved him very much, and spoke private wedding vows with him shortly after her fourteenth birthday. She also very badly wanted to kill him. He spent years trying to find medications that would stop his pedophilia, and eventually did end their sexual relationship. Of course, he also spent years emotionally blackmailing her into that sexual relationship in the first place.
It can't be said that he was an unequivocally bad influence in her life, either, although the reasons why are bitterly ironic: her own father was physically abusive. Her abuser was the person who kept telling her it was not okay for anyone to hit her or otherwise control her body (and indeed his own violence was emotional). Her father kept telling her that he didn't like her abuser because the guy wouldn't go drinking with him, which meant there had to be something creepy going on. The combination of wrong for the right reasons and right for the wrong reasons is tragic.
The other thing this book shows very clearly is the way that a community can just overlook what is going on sometimes. Fragoso's mother was mentally ill, had been abused herself, couldn't suss out trouble-- but the abuser spent time in jail during their acquaintance for abusing his foster children, the entire neighborhood seems to have yelled things at Fragoso from street corners, people kept coming up to her father and asking what was going on-- and it took until she was sixteen for a social worker to look into it.
At which point of course Fragoso denied everything, in an exchange that makes me wince: You have to protect other kids from him, the social worker says. I am, she thinks, by staying with him now. The social worker asks the abuser very pointedly if he has ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome, but can't find enough evidence to press charges.
And this particular knot of things, love and pain and fear and mutual somewhat-chosen self-destruction and no one ever quite noticing, the way that long-term sexual abuse as a child can be both the thing that is ravaging a child and at the same time the thing the child clings to to stop the ravaging and that that clinging is not ineffective-- that's what I haven't seen before in a book. That's what I think it's valuable people know about.
That's the way this book reflects the truth in ways I haven't seen before. Because this book is telling the truth, hard truths, I can assure you of its truthfulness. It wasn't fourteen years for me, it was twelve, and it wasn't anything like so often; but this is absolutely emotionally accurate, from beginning to end.
Including the fact that Fragoso has gone on to get married happily, have a child she appears to be raising well, get a Ph.D in English and go on with her life as a functional human being. Because that's true, too, that happens, people heal, and again that isn't something one sees in this kind of memoir, very much.
Therefore, although it is not an easy read, I do recommend this. It is not badly written, either.
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Date: 2011-03-20 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-19 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-19 03:31 pm (UTC)I don't think I'd choose to read it, but I'm glad it's out there, so that if people want a nuanced understanding of how complicated these situations can be in real life, they'll be able to find out and know.
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Date: 2011-03-19 05:33 pm (UTC)It sounds like it addresses another not-often-discussed issue, which is how once you're in a sufficiently bad situation, the classic example being a child abused in circumstances where the people who care can't help, and the people who could help don't care, there are literally no good options, only the bad ones that won't help you survive, and the bad ones that might help you get by until something that's actually good comes along.
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Date: 2011-03-19 06:46 pm (UTC)Something that grates against me in real-life situations is when helping professionals say stuff to people (kids or adults) about how awful the abuser must be - many if not most people in abusive situations are in something with someone that either they have love for and/or who does have love for them.
Saying that person is just BAD doesn't usually help anyone transition into anything better.
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Date: 2011-03-23 04:23 am (UTC)