Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

by Sue William Silverman

Overview

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You destroys our complacency about who among us can commit unspeakable atrocities, who is subjected to them, and who can stop them. From age four to eighteen, Sue William Silverman was repeatedly sexually abused by her father, an influential government official and successful banker. Through her eyes, we see an outwardly normal family built on a foundation of horrifying secrets that long went unreported, undetected, and unconfessed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820337784
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	07/01/2010
Series:	The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction , #4
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN is a faculty advisor at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the associate editor of the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Her first book, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (Georgia), received the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the author of Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction (made into a Lifetime TV movie) and Hieroglyphics in Neon, a collection of poems.

Editorial Reviews

A woman's excrutiatingly painful and explicit account of 14 years of incestuous abuse.

With great courage and startling compassion, Silverman tells the story of how her father, once chief counsel to the secretary of the Interior and later an international banker, made her his sexual companion. Beginning when she was four years old, the incest escalated from fondling in the bathtub to oral and finally full-fledged and frequent vaginal intercourse. With her mother's unspoken acquiesence ("I was a present to her husband") Silverman became a willing instrument in calming her beloved father's frequent rages. Extraordinarily frank ("It feels good, yes. I discover its pleasure before its shame"), Silverman is able to recreate the emotional trail that leads from terror to pleasure, from confusion and fear to disassociation. Two new personalities emerge to take the brunt of her father's sexual forays. One is Dina, passive and wanting only to please; the other is Celeste, angry, challenging, and hungry. But even with these guardian personae, the little girl Sue remains acutely vulnerable. As a second-grader, she felt so unprotected that she dropped out of school for a year; a few years later, during an especially traumatic period, she spent most of three months sleeping. As Silverman enters adolescence, she struggles to break away, but not until she leaves for college does her father abruptly stop his sexual marauding. Silverman spends the next 30 years trying to understand and control both her sexual aggressiveness and her self-starvation—an attempt, in essence, to make her abused body disappear. With therapy and a loving husband, she succeeds and, almost unbelievably, comes to terms with her parents as well.

Harrowing in its depiction of savage violation and profoundly moving in its portrait of a child's fear, confusion, and desperate search for a safe place.

Kirkus Reviews

Living, empowering proof that an orchid can bloom right up through concrete. A remarkable achievement from a remarkable woman who forces us to look for a word beyond 'survivor.'

author of Haiku - Andrew Vachss

Readers of Silverman's wrenching memoir . . . are in for a rough emotional ride, but it is well worth it.

Ms. Magazine

Searing, brave, powerfully-written . . . Sue Silverman's memoir is about more than incest; it is about evil, about denial, about the great chasm between the public facade of a prominent, successful family and its painful reality, and it is about how, as in a Greek tragedy, a curse has been passed down through several generations. This book is the cry that shatters the curse.

author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son - Adam Hochschild

Silverman's lyric style transforms a ravaged childhood into a work of art. The book reads like a poem.

St. Petersburg Times

This harrowing memoir gives voice to the inarticulate terror Silverman suffered as a child, when she could never find the right words to describe her situation. She has found them now.

Booklist

Nothing less than a bolt of electricity to the hopeful part of us that believes every portrait of a happy family that we see. . . . A terrifying and heartening book . . . I know it's going to be passed urgently from hand to hand.

author of Before and After - Rosellen Brown

Silverman has a brave, piercing intelligence which transcends psychological explanations and does not require symbolism to convey a sense of what she went through. . . . She has learned exquisitely how to look at what she could not face and how to speak through those silences.

Fourth Genre

This harrowing memoir gives voice to the inarticulate terror Silverman suffered as a child, when she could never find the right words to describe her situation. She has found them now.

Booklist

"With great courage and startling compassion, Silverman tells [her] story. . . . Harrowing in its depiction of savage violation and profoundly moving in its portrait of a child's fear, confusion, and desperate search for a safe place."—Kirkus Reviews

"This harrowing memoir gives voice to the inarticulate terror Silverman suffered as a child, when she could never find the right words to describe her situation. She has found them now."—Booklist
 

“Readers of Silverman's wrenching memoir...are in for a rough emotional ride, but it is well worth it.”—Ms. Magazine

"Silverman's lyric style transforms a ravaged childhood into a work of art. The book reads like a poem."—St. Petersburg Times

"Searing, brave, powerfully-written . . . Sue Silverman's memoir is about more than incest; it is about evil, about denial, about the great chasm between the public facade of a prominent, successful family and its painful reality, and it is about how, as in a Greek tragedy, a curse has been passed down through several generations. This book is the cry that shatters the curse."—Adam Hochschild, author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son

"Silverman has a brave, piercing intelligence which transcends psychological explanations and does not require symbolism to convey a sense of what she went through. . . . She has learned exquisitely how to look at what she could not face and how to speak through those silences."—Fourth Genre

"Living, empowering proof that an orchid can bloom right up through concrete. A remarkable achievement from a remarkable woman who forces us to look for a word beyond 'survivor.'"—Andrew Vachss, author of Haiku

"Nothing less than a bolt of electricity to the hopeful part of us that believes every portrait of a happy family that we see. . . . A terrifying and heartening book . . . I know it's going to be passed urgently from hand to hand."—Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After

From the Publisher