Reviews

The Telling: A Memoir by Zoe Zolbrod

jacqui_des's review against another edition

4.0

Memorable Quotes

“There are few takers for stray teenagers, those monsters of mood, oil, limbs, sex and stink. What a time to be thrust out to stalk the earth.”

“In any game of moral relativity it’s the children who demand our greatest sympathies. They’re always entirely guiltless, absolutely vulnerable – at what age is this no longer true?”

“The risk of becoming a victim was one of the defining features that separated our gender from the other, a big part of what made us girls and them boys.”

“Over twenty percent of children who report sexual abuse recant their accusations at some point. Research shows that most of the children who recant were originally telling the truth, and that family influences are what led them to rescind their testimony.”

“In many ways, I fall into the camp of borrowing from my parents’ parenting strategies – their mix of leniency and authority; their prioritization of honesty.”

“And of course some people should touch her butt and vulva, someday. She’ll want them to. She’ll want them to so badly that the world will consist of just that need, a spreading desire as burning and lit as lava, with the potential to change her landscape forever.”

“There is no excuse for emotionally, physically, or sexually abusing a child. But what becomes clear with study is that childhood trauma often begets trauma for the next generation of children. People who commit horrific acts are also fellow humans and were once children.”

“When something is both horrible and commonplace, especially when it’s caught in the web of loyalty and blood, it’s easy to look away, make the bet that it won’t happen again, assume if it’s really of great consequence, someone else will force it to stop.”

“...would my telling this story be more likely to heal, or help, or hurt?”

“There’s a universal understanding that protection equals love, that a father should guard his daughter, become enraged when he cannot, has failed if he participates in any way in the trespass of her innocence.”

“Research shows that people have a tendency to let current psychological states bias their memories of past events. The worse you feel at the time someone asks you about a previous event in your life, the worse you remember the past event to be.”

“...though I didn’t necessarily view the molestation as a dramatic or totalizing experience, it’s never sat right with me, it’s never fully come into focus through any of the various lenses through which I’ve tried to view it. I want to make sense of it.”

cook_memorial_public_library's review against another edition

4.0

A 2016 staff favorite recommended by Susie.

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cinnachick's review against another edition

5.0

Sexual abuse is horrifying and awful. But it leaves complex reactions and thoughts for victims, many of which I've felt haven't been covered in self-help or therapeutic literature. Not only does Zoe explain abuse in a nuanced manner, she explains recovery in a multi-faceted manner. She also manages to create a book about abuse that doesn't focus on the abuse. It is in here, so be warned if that is hard to read, but you don't feel scarred by the reading. This book focuses on the healing, not the abuse. A shift I appreciated. And it is done beautifully. A must read for any parent. Even if you're not an adult who was abused as a child.

geriatricgretch's review

5.0

amazing, but not perfect (and amazing in it's imperfection). the back and forth tug of both the timeline and teasing out of ideas surrounding Zolbrod's story was incredibly seamlessly rendered - one of the blurbs described this as a page turner and that was absolutely true for me. in some ways I was dreading reading this book, but I'm so glad that Read/Write Library picked it for their first selection for Hungry for Stories. a gut punch, but an important one.