My Father's House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing

A noted Canadian novelist details her tortured childhood as the victim of her father's incestuous desires, the devastating impact of incest on her life, and her life-long struggle to overcome its effects to live a whole life

In a memory breakthrough, Canadian novelist Fraser (Berlin Solstice, etc.) realized as she began her sixth novel, one dealing with incest, that she was recalling her own experience with her father, which amnesia had concealed for 40 years from her consciousness. The author recounts how her personality at the time split in two with the creation of a second self that assumed the repellent relationship with her father, although it surfaced in sudden rages and convulsions, and later, despite a happy marriage, in inexplicable depressions and sexual violence in her fiction. With compelling novelistic impact, Fraser relates through ever more portentous and specific dreams and mysterious forebodings the shattering moment of revelation 10 years after her father's death. Acknowledgment brought not only liberation of the other, long-suppressed self but forgiveness for her father and for herself. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild featured alternate; author tour.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this stunningly powerful memoir, Fraser, a successful Canadian journalist and novelist, recaptures a childhood that had been repressed for 40 years. She had no conscious memory of the incestuous sexual abuse to which she had been subjected. She was burdened, however, by emotional deadness and inexplicable depressions. Memories seeped through in dreams and in the sexual violence of her novels. Here, she tells her story with eloquence, compassion, and almost unbearable candor. Fraser's literary skill recaptures a child's understanding; contemplates her conflicted adolescence; and traces, finally, the healing process. A bestseller in Canada. Essential. Literary Guild alternate. Sally Mitchell, Temple Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.