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Synopsis
'My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.' Shame begins as the story of a 12-year-old girl, but it is also about the storyteller, a mature woman, the author herself. The violent moment lives inside her. The trauma comes at a moment when she is still so close to her mother and father that the threatened act of violence is incomprehensible. It cuts through her like an axe. Over time, the memory cools until it is just a snapshot she carries in her purse, unchanging even after years have passed and the girl has grown into a woman and a writer. Years later the cut is still there, but her whole being has grown around it like a tree that has been struck by lightning and survived. In a haunting, barely fictionalized memoir, the author of A Man's Place gives her most searing, revealing work to date.
Richard Bernstein
[An]. . .affecting wisp of a memoir. . . .Shame. . .is the mature woman's vision of herself at the moment when childhood innocence was replaced by shattering childhood terror. . . .[The book] contains . ..[a] sense of wonderment at the silently watching child that never really leaves us. — The New York Times