Guardian Review
In 1978 Debora Harding, then 14, was kidnapped in Omaha, Nebraska, as she tried to get home during an ice storm after a cancelled choir practice; she was driven to a phone booth, held at knifepoint and told to ask her father for a $10,000 ransom. Her masked attacker tied her up and put a sack over her head, raped her and left her, freezing, by a railway siding, while he drove to a nearby mall hoping to collect the money from her father. Harding wasted some time praying until she realised that she was going to have to save herself before she died of exposure. Somehow she managed to escape, removing the sack from her head by scraping her forehead against a wall. Her attacker was later arrested, confessed to everything and spent 25 years in prison. Her mother had a peculiar response to the attack. Decades later she told her daughter's husband, quite matter-of-factly, that the kidnap had never happened. Harding was so unsettled by her mother's belief that the abduction was just a fantasy, she began to question her own memory. Could she have concocted such an event in her mind? She and her husband begin an investigation into the assault, scouring FBI records and newspaper reports to uncover the details of what took place. Records confirmed her memories were entirely correct. What kind of a parent chooses not to believe their daughter's account of being kidnapped? We soon learn that the real villain of Harding's brave and beautifully written memoir is not her rapist but her dysfunctional mother. Although the narrative of the kidnap and its fallout provides the pretext for the book, the drama of that violent assault is quickly overshadowed by Harding's reflections on the quiet violence of her mother and the shattering impact this had on family life. The first remembered act of cruelty - the odd decision to lock six-year-old Harding and two of her sisters in an unheated garage for several hours during a snowstorm - is excused as the consequence of postnatal depression. It is more difficult for Harding to explain away later behaviour, when her mother beats her around the head for a failure to sort and fold the laundry, or flays her sisters' legs with a belt for drinking her Coke (something they hadn't done). Gradually Harding realises she cannot rely on her mother, and notes: "When Dad was home Mum was as different as a blackbird to a vampire." She observes the happiness of other families growing up around her in Omaha with fascination, registering with curiosity the warmth that a neighbour's mother exudes. Things do not improve when Harding and her sisters reach adolescence. Local police officers are startled when Harding's mother calls demanding they arrest her daughter because she has smoked a joint. They decline to come out to the family home, so she asks: "What if I brought her down to the station? Is there an officer who speaks to young criminals?" Privately, the officer tells Harding: "Your mother's behaviour is a little odd." These fragments of childhood pain are seen through the shifting lens of Harding's own, less extreme, struggles with parenting, but her book is more than a heartbreakingly disturbing account of childhood abuse in the US, in the vein of Tara Westover's Educated. A third, parallel strand explores her love for her kind, devoted father and carefully extracts moments of real happiness from the chaos of her early life. Having braced myself for misery, I found these sections the most impressive part of the book. A road trip to New York where they watch Rocky together, a wise conversation about how best to deal with ghosts hiding beneath the bed, running sessions together in the school gym - Harding's father helps her to become "fierce" in her love of life. All of which makes his reluctance to believe her memories of her mother's behaviour another painful betrayal. "I honestly still have a problem imagining it was as bad as you are saying. I'm not denying it, I'm just saying I never saw it," he tells her. There is of course no simple or happy resolution to any of this. Harding doesn't present herself as a triumphant victim who has successfully shaken off her trauma. Her husband, who comes across as a beacon of sanity and calm compassion, encourages her to write to give her "control over her thoughts" but she concludes that far from being therapeutic, the process of writing has often felt like an act of self-harm. She manages (just about) to hold on to her sense of humour. She describes a not entirely successful exercise in restorative justice, where she talks to her attacker in prison 25 years after the rape, and comes away underwhelmed by his apologies. There is no Hollywood gush of redemption, but Harding leaves, her head held high, "wanting to thank him for proving that he was an asshole".
Kirkus Review
A powerful account of sexual assault and decades of lingering trauma. The opening of Harding's memoir, told in brief episodes, finds her confronting Charles, who, when she was a young teenager, kidnapped and raped her--and, we learn, surely would have killed her had she not escaped. There he sat, imprisoned, nonchalantly, "as if he were waiting there just for me in the same way he'd been that afternoon, twenty-five years ago, when our paths happened to cross." The author reconstructs the terrible events of the assault, unpremeditated only to the extent that she just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time as Charles, recently released from juvenile detention, acted out his pent-up rage. Complicating the tale is a home life that might have seemed normal to a casual observer but that was not: Her unhinged, raging mother "beat my legs with a belt so bad I had to cover them up at school the next day" while her father did little to protect her from that constant wrath. Still, in the aftermath of that night in 1978, Harding forged a deep connection with him: "The crime had been important to my relationship with my father, forged an inseparable bond, and now it explained my unshakable loyalty to him," she writes. All of these threads have unhappy resolutions even as Harding tries to get at the root of the debilitating anxiety that ensued years later. She decides that one key to restoring her health was to follow the tenets of "restorative justice," one aspect of which is to face one's attacker and hold a dialogue--in this case one that took place just before his release from prison, testing whether the transformation from violent youth to spiritual adult he said he underwent was genuine at all. A thoughtfully told story that may inspire others to find healing in the wake of savage crime. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Harding's compelling memoir introduces readers to her emotionally fragile family and shares how being kidnapped and brutally raped at age 14 affected her life. Harding's mother was emotionally and physically abusive, and her gentle, loving father had a job that kept him on the road. Even when he was home, everyone tiptoed around, not wanting to set Mom off. This tense combination of fear and denial continued unabated when Harding was kidnapped by a neighborhood boy only three years her senior. Harding tells her story through chapters that skip around chronologically, from her early childhood to marriage and motherhood to events in her attacker's life, her efforts as an adult to gain emotional and mental stability, and the assault itself. Harding is completely honest, whether describing her wariness, defiance, bewilderment, self-doubt, or the truths she eventually discovered about herself and her parents. The title comes from a childhood game that aptly describes Harding's delicate dance with her family. Her unsparing and candid observations allow readers to really get to know this strong, determined survivor.