Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN
Series: Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction
Copyright Date: 1996
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Pages: 288
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46ngc1
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Book Info
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
Book Description:

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You destroys our complacency about who among us can commit unspeakable atrocities, who is subjected to them, and who can stop them. From age four to eighteen, Sue William Silverman was repeatedly sexually abused by her father, an influential government official and successful banker. Through her eyes, we see an outwardly normal family built on a foundation of horrifying secrets that long went unreported, undetected, and unconfessed.

eISBN: 978-0-8203-3778-4
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-x)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. xi-xii)
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. xiii-xiv)
  4. Preface
    Preface (pp. xv-xvi)
  5. Prologue: I Remember You, Father
    Prologue: I Remember You, Father (pp. 1-4)

    How can I help you?” Randy Groskind asks.

    This is the first question Randy, a therapist in Atlanta, asks me when I enter his office. I’m too tired to answer. I sit rigid on a couch and stare at the plant by the window, wishing I were small enough, light enough, to curl up inside one of the cool green leaves and sleep. This exhaustion—I feel the actual dense weight of the answer to his question. My head feels too heavy to think. My mouth feels too heavy to speak.

    I wonder: Do I extract the first snapshot from...

  6. RED
    • The Egyptian Princess Washington, D.C.: 1950
      The Egyptian Princess Washington, D.C.: 1950 (pp. 7-14)

      I am four and pretend I am an Egyptian princess. For this game I arrange planks of wood across my parents’ brown-and-white checked bedspread. The wood becomes a tributary of the Nile River, and as I flee along the bank, escaping, green reeds brush my legs. Someone is chasing me. Downstairs in the living room my father builds furniture with his electric saw, a gleaming metal table with a round, jagged blade, whirring as it nears the wood, whirring as it severs a plank gripped in a vise. I believe I hear the wood screaming, the metal slicing faster. I...

    • Heartbeats in Stone Bethesda, Maryland: 1951–1953
      Heartbeats in Stone Bethesda, Maryland: 1951–1953 (pp. 15-35)

      In Washington, D.C., we lived in two-family house on Southern Avenue. Now, when I am five, we move into a ranch house on Kingswood Road in the suburbs. How proud my parents are of their brand-new home, the first they've ever purchased. How beautiful are the hardwood floors with Oriental rugs from Israel. My father tells me what a lucky little girl I am, with my own private bedroom, the windows high, close to the ceiling, so no one can see inside. The secluded living room overlooks a dark forest. Now my father has a shed, detached from the house,...

    • Night Spirits St. Thomas: 1953–1958
      Night Spirits St. Thomas: 1953–1958 (pp. 36-84)

      In St. Thomas we live in a Danish colonial house next to Blackbeard’s Castle on Blackbeard’s Hill. bedroom is at one end of the house with three separate entrances. One can enter it from a wood porch which wraps around mountain side of the house and overlooks the Caribbean. Or can enter it from the stone terrace on the opposite side of the house, the land side, next to Blackbeard’s Castle and a dead-end street. Or one can enter my bedroom through my sister’s, although she keeps the door between our rooms shut tight.

      The bed in which I sleep...

    • New Jersey Girl Glen Rock, New Jersey: 1958–1964
      New Jersey Girl Glen Rock, New Jersey: 1958–1964 (pp. 85-176)

      Winter. St. Thomas’s red, green, blue mute to white snow, brown trees, New Jersey asphalt. An opaque iron sky replaces crimson sunsets, usurps colors that stream from the red core of the sun. Our house has no porch, no veranda. All the windows are shut tight. Only one door leads to my blue bedroom, where I now sit on my bed, staring at foreign feet, huge and plodding in thick white socks and heavy saddle shoes. I can’t wear my buffalo-hide sandals and hadn’t realized I would miss them. The French madras jumpers are packed away. I wear a bluegreen...

  7. BLUE
    • Tuesdays
      Tuesdays (pp. 179-223)

      How can I help you? Randy had asked.

      Change me, I think. Is that the answer? Stop me. Or teach me new words, I think. Maybe that’s the answer. Teach me to speak. Help me find a soul. Help me find my body. Teach me to cry.

      When I first see Randy, when he first asks this question, it is the mid-1980s. Over the years I have sought help from ten therapists. Randy is the eleventh. He must be the one who will finally be able to help me.

      Twenty years have passed since I first noticed the word—noticed...

    • Two Small Rooms in Minnesota
      Two Small Rooms in Minnesota (pp. 224-251)

      In the mid-1980s my parents move to Rochester, Minnesota. To me, it seems as if they go there to die, although to live in a retirement complex associated with the Mayo Clinic is not without logic. This move scares me. I don’t want to feel my fear of their deaths, so I look for the joke. I tell my friends I have the only parents in the world to retire in frigid Minnesota. Visiting them in Minnesota is scary. Who are these two old people? Have I ever known anything about them? They’re going to die with all their secrets...

    • The Girl on the Beach: Recovered
      The Girl on the Beach: Recovered (pp. 252-254)

      Now my parents are dead. They can only hurt me again if I let them. Only I can allow this to happen. Except I won’t. I can’t. It is time to turn my head and gaze in new directions. It is time to practice speaking the new words I have learned, time to hear all the new voices.

      “Maybe it’s time to recover her,” Randy says.

      Her. The little girl on the beach. I think of her alone on the beach, waiting. She waits for me, has always waited for the adult me to feed her, clothe her, love her....

  8. GREEN
    • Christmas Spirits
      Christmas Spirits (pp. 257-272)

      When I enter the classroom I notice her immediately. She is obese and has difficulty fitting onto the school chair attached to the desk. She wears thick glasses, and the skin on her face is pale as if she hides from sun, hides from light. Stringy hair trails to her shoulders. Her clothes, not just because of her weight, are ill-fitting, the material worn and beaded. She looks unsure, awkward, ashamed, defeated. And this is why I notice her immediately: because I remember my own awkwardness and shame, as if we are twins. Even though when I starved myself I...

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