Secret Life: An Autobiography - Softcover

Michael Ryan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747525455 ISBN 13: 9780747525455

Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING PLC, 1996

Synopsis

A candid but dispassionate memoir presents the experiences of a man who came of age in the 1950s and endured a lifelong struggle as a molested child, son of an alcoholic, and sexual deviant. 40,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

At the age of five, Michael Ryan was molested by a neighbor. Nearly 40 years later, he found himself methodically preparing to seduce a girl who was barely more than a child. As Ryan describes his free fall into sexual obsession, he creates an autobiography that is at once harrowing and redemptive, heartbreaking and profoundly moral. "By turns repelling and seductive . . . absorbing and disquieting."--New York Times Book Review.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ryan (God Hunger), from a devout Catholic family, was sexually molested at age five by a 23-year-old neighbor and, like many such victims, blamed himself primarily and his parents secondarily. His youth was complicated by his alcoholic father, who considered him his favorite child but abused him physically. Throughout his adolescence, Ryan thought about sex, but not notably more than his contemporaries. In adulthood, however, he became sexually obsessed, sleeping with both women and men; in 1981, he was fired by Princeton, where he taught creative writing, for having sex with students, which he has since come to see as a form of molestation based on his power. Several subsequent incidents brought Ryan to the realization that "my sexual compulsion was an attempt to feel my human value," and he now thinks of himself as a complete and mature human being. The book is the affecting baring of a psyche, but the sections on teenage panting and groping are long and tedious.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING PLC
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0747525455
• ISBN 13: 9780747525455
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356