Overview

She was a beautiful blond child, a quintessential Canadian teenager: she loved Saturday film matinees, giggled at pyjama parties, ran for student president, led the cheerleading squad, went steady with the right boy and married him, her proud father at her side. But from the age of seven Sylvia Fraser shared her body with a 'twin' who lived a separate life from her. This other self was created to do the things Sylvia was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do - the things her father made her do. As an adult, she had no recollection of a sexual relationship with her father, yet some connection always remained - pain, terror and guilt were never far from the surface. With tremendous power, candour and eloquence, Sylvia Fraser breaks through her amnesia to discover and embrace the self she left behind. MY FATHER'S HOUSE is at once a terrible account of a woman's coming of age and a lyric story of love and forgiveness.

Full Product Details

9780860681816

Table of Contents

Reviews

'MY FATHER'S HOUSE has the tension and pace of a detective novel - except that the detective is a part of the narrator's self, and so is the murder victim. A beautifully written, heart-wrenching and ultimatley healing story by an amazing and courageous woman' Margaret Atwood 'Her book mingles accounts of ordinary life with short, italicised memories of abuse, a method which throws a sinister shadow over the reader's mind, as all accounts of sexual abuse in the home do, by destroying the innocence of the ordinary with a stain of evil.' IRISH TIMES

MY FATHER'S HOUSE has the tension and pace of a detective novel - except that the detective is a part of the narrator's self, and so is the murder victim. A beautifully written, heart-wrenching and ultimatley healing story by an amazing and courageous woman - Margaret Atwood Her book mingles accounts of ordinary life with short, italicised memories of abuse, a method which throws a sinister shadow over the reader's mind, as all accounts of sexual abuse in the home do, by destroying the innocence of the ordinary with a stain - IRISH TIMES

Fraser's intense and searching memoir draws on much of the same material as Pandora (1973), her first novel, but here she concentrates on a repressed incestuous relationship with her father that went undetected but shadowed her personal development. It's an extremely adept presentation of a repugnant situation, to which Fraser brings literary gifts, vital insights, and a remarkable capacity for forgiveness. Blond and pretty, Fraser grew up her daddy's favorite (as incest daughters often do). By the middle of elementary school, she managed to block out memories of his advances and those of a neighbor who, overhearing them, also abused her. She had an otherwise paradigmatic Canadian girlhood, defined by an enduring circle of friends, the activities they enjoyed, and their basically stable school identities. But she created a second self who knew about those troubling experiences and provided a refuge for the distress they generated. Eventually, as a teen-ager, she refused her father adamantly and went on to considerable fulfillment in college, in her marriage, and in a journalism career without ever articulating the nature of their relationship. She was in her 40s when things started to come undone, when she tapped into submerged feelings and uncovered, bit by bit, the provoking traces of that early entanglement. All of us are born into the second act of a tragedy-in-progress, then spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out what went wrong in the first act. Fraser's account of that gradual recollection is very powerful, almost too smooth in its rendering of her long-delayed recognition, subsequent disclosure to the few involved, and the relief of corroboration. But her continuing candor - suspicions about an embittered aunt, reflections on the sexual violence in her novels - is exemplary; she has transformed tragic circumstances into a compelling work and restored herself as well. (Kirkus Reviews)

MY FATHER'S HOUSE has the tension and pace of a detective novel - except that the detective is a part of the narrator's self, and so is the murder victim. A beautifully written, heart-wrenching and ultimatley healing story by an amazing and courageous woman Margaret Atwood Her book mingles accounts of ordinary life with short, italicised memories of abuse, a method which throws a sinister shadow over the reader's mind, as all accounts of sexual abuse in the home do, by destroying the innocence of the ordinary with a stain IRISH TIMES

Author Information

Sylvia Fraser was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1935. She published her first novel, PANDORA, in 1972. Her other works of fiction include THE CANDY FACTORY, A CASUAL AFFAIR, THE EMPEROR'S VIRGIN and BERLIN SOLSTICE. She was awarded the Canadian Authors Association's prize for non-fiction for this book. She lives and writes in Toronto.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available