For the years that Richard and his beloved brother Stanley lived with this woman, they were abused they were physically and mentally tortured. Worse, when he married for the second time - after having parked his eldest son withĪ distant relative and shuffled his two younger boys (Richard was the youngest of the three) from boardinghouse to boardinghouse - he married a woman who was a genuine sadist, a woman who, in Mr. His father, "a boilermaker's helper, not a boilermaker," and a passive, self-involved man, seemed unable to recognize his three sons' loss and need. Need that a parent's suicide creates in a child does not have to be cataclysmic, however: the surviving parent, other family members and even a loving community can go a long way toward meeting that need and the childĬan grow up almost happy.
Herself." This awful fact is the "hole in the world" that defined and essentially destroyed the author's childhood and, as he eventually reveals, afflicted much of his adult life as well. He first sentence sets the stage and tone of Richard Rhodes's wrenching childhood memoir: "When I was thirteen months old, my mother killed OctoThe Abuse Had to Stop By RUSSELL BANKS
0 kommentar(er)
