I do tend to read a lot; if something captures my curiousity I usually run straight to the Internet. If websites there don’t answer all my questions the next stop is the Kindle Store, where I’ll get a book or three on the matter.
This is usually a good thing, and I’ve managed to store up quite a lot of information that I’m sure may come in handy some time. Trivial Pursuit nights with friends, most likely.
I’ve been doing this a long time now, and I swear it is NOT my imagination. Books are getting more and more salacious, as though the only way Reading can compete with TV Watching is to bring on the graphic sex and violence. I’ve ended up setting aside more and more of the most popular reads lately, as the graphic violence and detailed sex overwhelms the story.
But this book–and please forgive me for not telling you anything about it beyond the fact that it’s a non-fiction memoir–was the absolute end for me. I have never before now actually thrown up after reading something. And let me tell you that’s an experience you really don’t want.
The author of this book decided that their story of sexual molestation needed to be told in the most graphic detail as possible. But the ghost writer decided to eroticise the descriptions of the molestation scenes. So there I was reading something that was ostensibly about an entirely different topic altogether, but finding myself reading a sex scene between an adult and an eight year old child. A scene written just like you’d find in a romance novel.
I hate to come off as prudish, and I generally don’t mind sex scenes if they contribute to the story*. But this book was a non-fiction book about something else altogether. And yet here I was, ten pages into it and reading utter garbage.
Yes, I’ve returned the book. And yes, I’ve complained to Amazon about the content. If only I could wash my brain.
*which is why I’ve never had a problem with the graphic depictions in the GRRM novels.
Pass the brain bleach. And the breath mints.
Not to sound all hand-wringing and shrewish, but what is going on that anyone in their right mind would think that gratuitous pedophilia is acceptable on any level?
You know, I am just at a total loss. There was absolutely _no need_ for the topic to be raised at all. The author purports to have a degree of expertise with the subject I was researching and the book was marketed as one that would provide the answers I was looking for in my research. But the publisher and ghostwriter clearly thought the best way to convince the public of their author’s expertise was to “humanise” the person. So the first chapter was about that author’s despairing childhood of poverty, sexual exploitation and misery. I guess they think books about nonfiction subjects will only sell if they titillate.
And even though I don’t think the whole “this is how I grew up” angle was necessary, if that’s the story that author had to tell then that’s the story. Fine. But you CAN just say “I was sexually molested by Blank Blankerson, beginning at age eight.” (Allison Arngrim’s handling of the topic in _Confessions of a Prairie Bitch_ was spot on.)
In a way it kind of reminds me of my dogs. If I accidentally step on Quinn’s tail, he’ll turn and snap at Gob. I wonder if this wasn’t the author turning and snapping at the audience.
Disgusting. I’m glad you logged your complaint with Amazon.
“I wonder if this wasn’t the author turning and snapping at the audience.”
…and there you have it.
People are weird and do weird things.
Like I always tell my wife – “People are NOT rational.”
That sounds like it went somewhere so far beyond the pale it was infrared. I can’t imagine that being necessary or useful for the story. I do wish you would tell the name of the book so I and your other readers can avoid it at all costs.
Without wanting to force you to relive it, I’m curious as to how you parsed the contributions of the two different authors (the subject vs. the ghost) to the grotesquerie that you read. Is it just that someone who’d actually been through that experience could never write about it in that way?
I went back and forth about telling the name of the book. (If you follow me on Goodreads, it IS there. And it’s also in my Amazon reviews.) But since I always end up pretty high on the Google search results–blogs that are updated regularly usually do because they are shown as “more active” pages–I didn’t want actual losers who search for ch*ld P04n to be all “GOAL!” about it.
But to answer your other question I will say that it was one of the books by one of the Jessop women written in the wake of the Warren Jeffs debacle. I have to explain a couple of things about myself:
1) I now avoid the news at all costs. I’ll check the top stories once every other day on the internet in print form only. But for health and sanity reasons I don’t watch TV news. Ever.
2) Because of Reason #1 I didn’t even KNOW about the Warren Jeffs thing until I began reading reviews of these books about polygamists.
Now that I do know, though, it appears that in the wake of the initial scandal, several publishers rushed to market with prurient tell-all books to satisfy the general public’s curiousity. And since there were, all of a sudden, five or six different books from various “survivors” of the Warren Jeffs religiosocial group, it seems that the publishers pushed for as much prurience as possible to snag a larger piece of the market share.
The book I got was one of the most highly-rated. My father’s birth parents were a sort of polygamists (long story) so I’ve long been interested in that as a social construct. I’m also highly involved in comparative religious studies, and having grown up in Amish Country with several ex-Amish (I’m a Mennonite) I’m doubly interested in fundamentalist splinter groups. So I figured that the book I was buying was a great resource.
What I failed to do was to read all the great reviews at Amazon and Goodreads. If I had I would have realised that the thing that most people rated the book so highly for WAS the “painful sexual detail.”
I believe that people saw the Jeffs story on the news, heard the newscasters allude to all of the various prurient goings-on and got curiouser and curiouser. So they went in search of greater detail. Not necessarily about “this is what we believe and why we believe it, and how that belief impacts our daily life.” But about the weird sex stuff.
Most of the good reviews for the book said things like “this was painful to read, but I’m so glad that Flora Jessop was honest. I feel like I really understand what those women went through.”
Although what society has become when we can’t empathise with a birds’-eye overview (“I was raped”; “I was molested”) and instead need Tab-A Slot B details, I don’t even want to think about.
Blargh. this is a blog-length comment. So sorry.
But knowing what information I had about the Experiential Author and being a life-long reader and author myself with a lot of background in linguistics, it was fairly easy to tell what passages were dressed by the ghost-writer. There are certain words and turns of phrase that subliterate women with 6th grade educations aren’t likely to use.
And frankly I don’t imagine that many survivors of incest and sexual abuse would tell their abuse story in the manner included in the book. I’ve known a fair few of those folks and heard a lot of their stories in one-on-one peer counseling sessions. Even in the intimacy and comparative safety of that setting they have NEVER described the abuse story in the lurid fashion the book used.