Reviews:
Oprah's Book Club
June 2005
Reviews of The Laid Daughter ...
The Chorus May/June 1999
by Donita
Lukich
The courage it took for Helen Bonner, a college professor, to open up her life, using her journals and photo albums, is amazing. She tells her story and withholds nothing. Many incest survivors were conditioned at early ages to keep the secrets of their perpetrators, led to believe that we were conspirators in sexual activity. Telling our stories is not always safe. However, Bonner tells it all. The Laid Daughter demonstrates feelings and beliefs that are very common among incest abuse survivors --- dissociations, flashbacks, nightmares, unlovable/inadequate feelings, suppression or repression of memories, and even MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder). Bonner's work serves to "normalize" these symptoms. After reading the book, survivors may not feel so strange for experiencing them. The Laid Daughter is an excellent educational tool for professionals, graduate students, survivors and the general public.
The Healing Woman Oct. l996
by Aubrieta
V. Hope
In the pages of Helen Bonner's compelling story, I glimpsed a
child, a very bright child who survived devastating abuse. Creative and
daring, the child speaks in dreams and journal entries. Because the author
writes from an adult perspective, the child remains in the shadows, around
the corner, between the lines. But she no longer searches a dark house.
For Helen Bonner has lifted years of confusion surrounding the humiliating
sexual abuse and terrifying physical abuse she suffered at the hands of
her father and mother. She tells about recovering and healing traumatic
childhood memories, yet hers is not simply a book about incest. Only a few
paragraphs scattered throughout the book directly recount sexually abusive
events. The Laid Daughter is an uncompromisingly honest story about
overcoming, achieving, and growing. "Like a detective, I went through a
cardboard box of tattered, handwritten journals, kept for years, looking
for connections." A good book.
VOICES newsletter,
The Chorus, Oct. l996
Phyllis Froehle
This is an incest story ... with a different viewpoint. Helen saw
herself as like the daughter of Leda in mythology, a woman taken by Zeus
in the disguise of a swan. She asks herself if, like Helen of Troy, she
sees her father as a God who has power over her. One of the story's
appeals to me is that Helen is in her later years, like me, before she
addresses the fact that her life is out of control. The intervening years
are filled by broken marriages, numerous relationships with men and
dysfunctional relationships with children. I particularly admire her
honesty about even the sexual exploits of her life, which I believe are a
problem for many of us survivors. Helen's descriptions of her progress
toward wholeness ring bells of familiarity. This book would be very
encouraging for younger men and women too. One chapter, American
Auschwitz, describes her attendance at the l993 conference and its effect
on her. VOICES is proud to have had Helen Bonner as one of its
presenters at the Indianapolis Conference.
The Pioneer, Bemidji, MN. Sept 13, l995
Louise Mengelkoch
Writers who publish confessional memoirs walk a fine line between
embarrassing self-absorption and courageous honesty with a universal
message. Throw in sex as the central issue, and the fine line almost
disappears. Helen Bonner manages to walk that fine line. Her book is
compelling, horrifying and, in the end, illuminating. Bonner says she
wrote the book to counter the current notion that false memories are being
rampantly implanted in millions of people by unscrupulous therapists. Her
book does that and a lot more. Her decades of diligent journal entries
provide solid evidence --- tortured dreams, everyday experiences and some
fine short stories -- all written without conscious knowledge of the
incest. As she sifts through her past, we root for the younger Bonner as
she alternately struggles to learn the truth and shrinks from it.
Bonner is at her best when she retells her narrative with honesty
and salient detail, such as this scene from her childhood: "The house
smelled of furniture polish, and my father's shoes made white marks on the
waxed floors. Mother always kept house like that, everything ironed, even
the sheets, even our underwear." Now Bonner should know why she saved
those puzzle pieces. Her instincts, despite her troubled life, were sound.
It took all her accumulated skills as a woman, a lover, a mother, an
academic and a writer to fit those pieces together so they make a clear,
beautiful picture. Out of her pain has come something eloquent.