Tiger, Tiger will start a thousand conversations. Margaux Fragoso achieves the unthinkable with empathic clarity: she humanizes a pedophile. In doing so, she makes his crime unimaginably more frightening. Her portrayal of their relationship is shocking, revelatory, and fearless. As the story of a victim, it is gripping; as a work of literature, it's a triumph.” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
“A courageous memoir of sexual violation and a childhood not just stolen but obliterated…Fragoso shines a bright light of transformation into the darkest corners of an unthinkable (but all too common) past.” —Pam Houston, More
“Astonishing…Brilliantly reveals her as more than a survivor: First and foremost, Fragoso is an artist.” —Marie Claire
“Told in a voice that combines childlike wonder with grown-up wisdom…Fragoso manages to tell a disturbing story beautifully.” —The Washington Post
“Margaux Fragoso has a remarkable lyric gift.…At once beautiful and appalling, a true-life Lolita.” —New York magazine
“Her tale loops amazingly around her own coming-of-age and sets her down in adulthood with a transformative twist.…It breaks the mold.…An astonishing and heartbreaking drama.” —Elle
“Written without self-pity, rancor, or even judgment…Tiger, Tiger offers us yet another opportunity to open our eyes and redeem ourselves.” —Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times
“A born storyteller…A call for awareness, understanding, prevention, and healing.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Ms. Fragoso is a poet….The cosmic profundity of what she has experienced…is inextricable from her gift as a narrator and contemplator of her own experience.” —New York Observer
“There are some experiences that come laced with a sense of indelible influence—-certain train rides that you know you'll remember forever even as they're happening.…Reading Tiger, Tiger produces one of those sensations.” —The Boston Globe
“In this gut-wrenching memoir of sexual abuse, [Margaux Fragoso] explores with unflinching honesty the ways in which pedophiles can manipulate their ways into the lives of children. . . . Fragoso's sense of alienation—Curran controlled her world for more than half her life—is palpable in her telling. Using her own diaries and the myriad letters, diaries, and photographs Curran left behind, Fragoso eloquently depicts psychological and sexual abuse in disturbing detail.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Disqueting . . . Culled from the four diaries she kept during the ordeal, Fragoso writes with searing honesty about her serpentine entanglement and of Curran's calculated, menacing exploitation of her. Intensive psychotherapy and new motherhood provide a hopeful coda to her unspeakable experience. A gripping, tragic and unforgettable chronicle of lost innocence and abuse.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“You may think you've already decided about a child's ordeal with a sexual predator, but under Margaux Fragoso's command you will consider the richest depths of experience, terrible, bright, and beautiful. Fragoso writes with unguarded grace and provides a voice—real and haunting—for those children, everywhere among us, who are deprived of theirs.” —Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death
“Tiger, Tiger is stunning, in all the possible manifestations of that word.” —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“Once in a generation, an essential book—a necessary book—comes along and challenges our bedrock assumptions about life. Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger is that book. Family life, the corruption of innocence, sexual abuse, pedophilia—all are unflinchingly yet exquisitely rendered as Fragoso experienced them. You will never view childhood the same way after reading Fragoso's monumentally important book.” —Louise DeSalvo, author of Writing as a Way of Healing
Told in a voice that combines childlike wonder with grown-up wisdom…Fragoso manages to tell a disturbing story beautifully, leading readers into the secret world she inhabited for decades and even inspiring a modicum of sympathy for the man who manipulated and abused her.
—The Washington Post
It's testimony to Fragoso's narrative abilities that she can render both her own and Curran's points of view convincingly, as different…Written without self-pity, rancor or even judgment, Tiger, Tiger forces readers to experience Curran simultaneously as the object of a little girl's love and fascination and as a calculating sex offender who cultivates her dependence on him while contriving to separate her from anyone who might prevent his molesting her. Balanced uncomfortably between these antipodes, Tiger, Tiger is the portrait of a man who will disgust and alienate readers by a writer too honest to repudiate her love for him.
—The New York Times
Disquieting memoir about the 15-year relationship between a child and a predatory sexagenarian.
Fragoso's New Jersey childhood consisted of sharing a bed in a slummy, cramped one-bedroom apartment with her mentally ill mother and hard-drinking, Army-veteran father, who worked as a jeweler. She was just seven when she met 51-year-old pedophile Peter Curran at a public pool in 1985 and subsequently invited to his home. Hopelessly unaware of the inappropriateness of the arrangement, her naive mother joined her daughter on a series of visits to Curran's expansive house—an interactive, wide-eyed wonderland alive with his two young sons and a vast array of kid-friendly pets. A perfect escape from her family life, Fragoso's chaperoned (then solo) visits became more frequent as Curran drew closer and more physically daring. At first, he'd discreetly hug and kiss her in the basement, then coerced her into clumsy, manipulative sexual advances, labeling his actions as "something that people in love, like we are, do together." Eventually, Fragoso's perceptive father forbade her from visiting Curran, who continued to take in a random series of female foster children. But the carefree whimsy of the author's childhood had already fallen victim to Curran's premeditated manipulation. After reuniting with him two years later (as her mother's sanity deteriorated), Fragoso became withdrawn, increasingly codependent and cooperative during their sex games. In wincingly frank, graphic scenes, the author intricately details her harrowing evolution from a doe-eyed innocent girl to a broken, emotionally scarred victim who, at 22, was further crushed after receiving Curran's 10 handwritten suicide notes along with the key to his car. Culled from the four diaries she kept during the ordeal, Fragoso writes with searing honesty about her serpentine entanglement and of Curran's calculated, menacing exploitation of her. Intensive psychotherapy and new motherhood provide a hopeful coda to her unspeakable experience.
A gripping, tragic and unforgettable chronicle of lost innocence and abuse.
