The William and Mary Girl

About the Book

You can’t get there from here. Not any more. No road exists today to take you – to take anyone – anywhere near the place where the awful things happened. The reason no one can go there, though, is that it’s no longer there -- the ostensibly happy and naive; the joyfully prosperous world that was America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I’d made a life in that world; living in it was for me, for a long time, incredibly good; But one day everything I loved and believed in and counted on became something more horrible, even, than I remembered happening years before; what happened to my life now would take years to overcome. When I was thirteen, my father--- in almost every way an intelligent, kind, sensitive man, found himself gratifying my mother’s rage: I had “talked back” angrily to one or both of them. I was not a beautiful child; I knew that and hated it. And later I’d know that Mama wanted no ugly duckling in her life-- I loved Mama, but what she couldn’t feel for me was clear. Too often a terrible scene would begin to play itself out; insane, angry violence would again overwhelm me, demolishing everything I was; I‘d feel it for the rest of the day and the night as well. And as Daddy imparted his rage to me -- to my life itself -- my own anger would rise to meet it; the scenes that took place at our house were terrible. And later, the halting, painful, always slow climb up the stairs to bed was always more of an ordeal than I could bear to face. And I was sure that with every blow my father administered, as he swung again and again at my head,, that my life had already been ruined, that I could never overcome what had been happening. Although for years I hoped I was wrong about that, and I did my best.... and continued to hope.....

About the Author