Notes from the author . . .
From my journal-l992: Here I am, the writer woman looking at herself. Around me are my journals, full of secrets and dreams and love and hope and pain and rage, along with my stories and half finished books. What I'm remembering from my session today is Glenda saying, "You want to write and you want to do therapy. You can do them both." Not exactly a happy story I would be writing, and yet I have never seen it as an unhappy story. A love story of sorts.... I wanted to write a personal account of the results of incest, the exhausting cycles, the indicative nightmares, the repressed memories, so that others will know they can trust their dreams, trust their memories, trust themselves, or loved ones who are survivors. But I wasn't sure I had the courage to tell the truth about my often sordid personal life. Yet, if my story was to mean anything, if it was to be useful, I had to tell the truth, all of it, even the parts I was ashamed of.
The book begins when my life as a college professor is being threatened by gradually increasing disturbances; my barely suppressed anger after giving lectures on Homer's heroic tales, my disproportionate despair after seeing a rape scene in a Vietnam movie, my unreasonable anger in a Bible discussion class. I didn't want to write just another story about a sad abuse victim; I wanted to show how unrecognized early trauma can emerge many years later, eating away at one's carefully constructed life. I was an expert on that, because it was happening to me. Who better to tell people about recovered memories in a way that might make credible the almost unbelievable? But I would tell it like fiction, like a good story.