Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

Title Details

Pages: 288

Illustrations: 1 photo

Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 09/02/1999

ISBN: 9-780-8203-2175-2

List Price: $24.95

eBook

Pub Date: 07/01/2010

ISBN: 9-780-8203-3778-4

List Price: $23.95

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

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  • Description
  • Reviews
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.

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author/Editor

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.