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| MY FATHER'S HOUSE: a Memoir of Incest and of Healing From a pretty blonde child, she grew into a popular teenager - an honour student, a member of students' council and a high-school cheerleader. She married a handsome lawyer and launched a successful career as a journalist and a novelist. But, from the age of seven to seventeen, Sylvia Fraser shared her body with a "twin" who lived a life separate from hers, with different memories and experiences. This secret Other Self was created by Sylvia to do the things she was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do - the things her father made her do. Though she had blocked off conscious knowledge of her sexual relationship with her father, some connection always remained, marring what should have been the happiest events of her life with inexplicable terror and guilt. My Father's House becomes at once a horror story, a mystery and a coming-of-age story, as Sylvia Fraser describes how she broke through her amnesia to discover and embrace the tortured self she left behind. My Father's House has been translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish and Hebrew. It was a Canadian and U.S. Literary Guild Selection, and won the Canadian Authors' Association Non-Fiction Book Award, 1987. |
| PRAISE FOR MY FATHER'S HOUSE: "My Father's House has the tension and pace of a detective novel - except that the detective is a part of the narrator's self, and so is the murder victim. A beautifully written, heart-wrenching and ultimately healing story by a amazing and courageous woman." - Margaret Atwood "Sylvia Fraser's narrative breathes with the lived-in texture of growing up in the forties and fifties, of marriage and divorce in the following decades. This memoir is marked throughout by an urgent, virtually egoless candour that is as clear and unaffected as glass." - Globe & Mail "It's just stunning. It knocked me for a loop." - Peter Gzowski, Toronto Star "One can relax and enjoy Ms. Fraser's writing, which is rich yet superbly honed." - New York Times Book Review "Haunting, courageous and compelling ... a literary tour de force." - Boston Herald "Ambitious and highly readable." Booklist (starred review) "My Father's House offers a rare double gift - unmasking a terrible evil and showing how its legacy of pain can be assuaged." - Maclean's |
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