• Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
• Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction
Author Sue William Silverman’s first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, is not an easy book to read. In a style that is both explicitly raw and profoundly vulnerable, she exposes the fourteen years of savage sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father while her mother remained silent and, therefore, complicit.
As I read these intertwined snapshots of memory that lay bare her fear, her pain, her confusion, her shame, her excruciating loneliness, I wept for this lost little girl. Sometimes, I felt bile rise at the back of my throat and rage surge through my veins. Most of all, I yearned to enter the pages and somehow rescue her. Get her out of that awful house filled with terror and violence, wrap her in my arms, and take her somewhere safe.
I recognize, though, that this memoir’s very existence is comforting proof that Silverman doesn’t need me to rescue her. She is already safe. How else could she have spoken the unspeakable with such astounding artistry and grace? Without really knowing her, I am certain that, though the powerless, victimized girl will probably always dwell somewhere inside of her, the woman Silverman has become is a resilient and extraordinarily courageous survivor.
I can also make this claim because I’ve met her once before and had the privilege of hearing her speak. At the same 2013 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Boston where Kim Stafford’s words prompted this quest, I listened to Silverman eloquently contradict some of the literary purists who dismiss the idea that therapy and writing can have points of intersection. Silverman is a brilliant writer, but she’s also a gifted and articulate speaker, able to fully engage with the room and command our attention.
In a panel discussion called “This Is Not a Cigar: The Uses of Therapy in a Writing Workshop,” Silverman shared the importance of involving selective therapeutic practices in the writing-workshop setting—particularly when teaching students of creative nonfiction. “Writing teachers are on the front lines of emotional truth,” she says. “Listening and safety are two of the most valuable things I learned from my therapist. Our students need to feel like they are in a safe place where their voices can be heard and valued before any issues of craft can be raised.”
Silverman is speaking from a vast reserve of experience. She’s taught prose in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts since 2003 and led countless prose workshops.
After the panel, a writer friend, a recent VCFA graduate, introduced me to Silverman. A petite woman with strawberry-blonde hair, Silverman is bubbly and down to earth. In that first brief interaction, I sensed a profound kindness in her. So, when I start considering the writers whose memoirs have been particularly meaningful to me and whose journeys to tell their hard stories I want to unpack, Sue William Silverman tops my list.
She responds to my pitch less than three hours after I e-mail her, writing, “Thank you for letting me know what my work has meant to you. I’m truly touched. It also means a lot to me to know some of your own story. And it’s a powerful one. I think that’s so very important that you moved to a place where you could discover your story within the story of your family. That shows much courage, and I admire you.”
Admiration coming from an author like Sue William Silverman is no little thing. Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1995. Since then, she’s written two more memoirs. Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction, written in a bold and lyrical style, recounts Silverman’s years of destructive sexual behavior and how she traveled the difficult road to recovery and self-value. The memoir was made into a Lifetime Original Movie in 2008. Her latest book, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, released just a week before I e-mailed her, is a sometimes funny, often tender account of her fascination with the pop music icon and his public image as a loving and safe father, juxtaposed against the brutality of her own father. It’s a story of finding a place to belong. Silverman has also published a collection of poems, Hieroglyphics in Neon, and her guidebook for writers venturing to tell their personal stories, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, has been positioned alongside Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Stephen King’s On Writing as an essential reading and teaching text that addresses the craft and psychological challenge of memoir writing.
By breaking the silence that so often shadows the topics of incest and sex addiction, Silverman has become a sought-after speaker and advocate for victims of abuse. She’s appeared on numerous radio and television shows, including The View and Anderson Cooper 360, and has been the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary and a John Stossel ABC-TV special. “Your voice is out there,” she tells me from her home office in Michigan when we meet via Skype on a Friday afternoon in March. Though she’s nine hundred miles away, the wonders of technology give us the chance to talk face-to-face, with only a screen between us. “You start playing a different role. Now you are the expert.”
She chuckles as she continues, “If you went into a bookstore and asked for Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, it would be in the child-abuse section. It’s not going to be in some sort of literary section.” She laughs because she used to balk at this pigeonholing of her work. “And then I had to say, ‘Get over yourself. What difference does it make?’ Yes, I see myself as a literary writer, but my books really have helped people.”
When she started writing about her childhood, Silverman did not set out to gain recognition as a survivor of abuse. “I sat down to write,” she says, “and what became Terror, fell out of me, like in three months. Page after page just came rolling out of the printer. Clearly I had something to say about myself.”
Silverman describes her process. “I wrote in a brain fever. It really almost came out of the ether, you could say, except on some deeper level, I think that thought [of writing my story] had been with me for a long, long time.”
And for a long, long time, Silverman kept that thought hidden, even from herself. Like so many other memoirists who trained as fiction writers, she spent ten years writing the book as a novel. In the 1980s, when she started writing, Silverman says, “I’d never even heard the word ‘memoir.’ No one was writing one. You were a poet or you were a fiction writer or a journalist. So I saw myself as a novelist. And I did not have the slightest thought of writing memoir. I’d never even read one, outside of maybe The Diary of Anne Frank. Other than that, nothing.”
She wrote six novels that were all in some way about incest. “But I sort of was wearing a mask,” she admits, “because I certainly wasn’t going to admit to it myself.” Silverman kept up the charade that the characters in her novels were in no way connected to her. “I mean, when I think back on it now, one of those novels is even about sex addiction before the term ‘sex addiction’ was even around. It’s so weird that I was writing about myself having no idea that I was writing about myself. And if somebody had asked me then if I was writing about myself, I would have said, ‘No, of course not.’”
In her books and when she speaks, Silverman is candid about how therapy played a central role in helping her cope with and sort through her trauma. She says it was her therapist, and not another writer, who suggested that she might want to write her story as a memoir, a true story. “At that point,” she says, laughing, “I thought that he was the crazy person, not me!” She couldn’t see herself as someone worth writing about. “How I saw myself was as this pathetic person who couldn’t do anything. I was just a loser and a failure.” She laughs again and adds, “You know, all of those nice messages we speak to ourselves.” It appears that many of us on the journey to tell our stories are experts in self-sabotage.
Silverman continued to resist the idea of telling her real story. And then, within days of each other, both of her parents died, and her therapist said, “Sue, maybe now you’ll feel safe enough to write about yourself.”
To humor him, she thought she’d maybe write a short essay. “Then it was just so there, that I couldn’t stop writing,” she says. “I didn’t question or think of anything. The words were just there. The images were just there. The metaphors were just there.”
Silverman kept the writing very close, though, and didn’t share it with anyone in process, not even her therapist. “I didn’t want anybody influencing what I had to say. I didn’t show it to my sister, and say, ‘Are you okay with this?’ Because it doesn’t matter if she’s okay with it or not. Yes, it would be nice if she’s okay with it, but if she’s not okay with it, I’m still going to write it. I own my story. If she disagrees with it, then she gets to write her own book if she wants. This is what happened to me. This is my truth. This was my story, and I needed to tell it.”
The point that Silverman emphasizes for me, though, is that the ease with which the story came to her, and her ability to own it, would not have happened without those ten years of writing fiction. “Even though it’s fiction, let’s face it, you’re still learning how to write. I was learning how to do dialogue; I was learning how to construct a plot or arc; I was learning how to develop a character on the page. It was just that with the memoir, it just so happened that character was me.”
Silverman had learned the craft of writing, so when she was finally ready to write this story, she didn’t really have to think about craft at all. And the story rolled out of her so quickly, she says that there was no time for it to frighten her.
“Writing Love Sick was much scarier,” she says, than writing Terror and reassures me that although her first experience was different, fear in the memoir-writing process is completely natural.
“With Terror,” she explains, “you know you’re writing about yourself as a little kid, and this adult, this father, is doing something to you. That has a sort of a built-in sympathy for you.”
Silverman did not feel that same cover of safety with Love Sick because the choices she recounts in that book are her own. “Writing about being a sex addict is like: Here I am; I’m an adult. I am having affairs with married men when I myself am married. I’m cheating on my husband. I’m doing all of this really bad behavior and destructive behavior. So, what are people going to think of me?”
Silverman tries to ignore those thoughts about other people’s reactions and keep her focus on the writing, something she also encourages her students to do. But, when she was writing Love Sick, she had a hard time looking at herself on the page and knowing she’d done those things. And even though she says she had good reason for her behavior—“Basically, my father told me I was just good for sex and that was it”—Silverman had so much shame that she says she sometimes did question whether to write her story.
I ask Silverman if she encountered any of the same stumbling blocks with Terror, even though the writing of that first memoir was so intense that perhaps she didn’t really have time to question things.
“The interesting thing about the first book, the two sections that I had the most trouble writing—and probably you’ll find this sort of ironic, because I do—were not about the child abuse, not about what my father had done to me. The two sections that just brought me to my knees were the sections where my parents died and where my cat died.” The pain that crosses Silverman’s features highlights the grief in those memories. She confides, “I just was a basket case, and I would have to lie down and just sob for a while.”
The reason for those powerful reactions, Silverman believes, is because those two events were much more recent. She’d sorted out a lot of the childhood experiences in therapy, but her parents’ deaths happened about two weeks before she started writing, and her beloved cat, the one thing she felt responsible for in her life, had just died, as well. “I hadn’t really processed that in any other way significantly, say in therapy, so I would never, if I went out to give a reading, even now, I would never read either of those sections.” I hear a tremor in her voice.
“How were you able to keep writing them?” I ask.
“I knew that they had to be part of the story,” she replies. “Those two events, those deaths were so big and significant that they just . . . I knew that they had to be in this book. But I don’t think I could even look at those sections today without crying. It was just so tough.”
In Terror, Silverman writes about the difficult truths that her parents’ deaths revealed to her: “My father and my mother each had a choice, could have chosen a different definition of love. They could have realized they didn’t know how to love their children healthy, love them well. [ . . . ] They were the parents, the adults, they chose to be. We all are the parents, the adults, we choose to be.”
These insights only came to Silverman by writing through those scenes. “The reason why I write memoir,” she says now, “is to be able to see the experience itself in a way. I hardly know what I think until I write. The therapy is one way of sort of processing things. But it’s only in writing about some of these things that we discover and understand the metaphors of our experience that give our life meaning. Writing is a way to organize your life, give it a frame, give it a structure, so that you can really see what it was that happened.”
“When you’d framed your experience into Terror, when you’d finished, how did it feel?”
“It felt really good, actually. I felt relieved. It was very different than when I finished writing the novels, because on some level I knew the novels were all really awful and that they really were never going to get published. I could tell the difference. I knew the book was worthy of publication. I knew my genre was creative nonfiction. I had found my voice.”
And finding her voice and speaking her experience shifted how Silverman viewed the genre, a shift that reaffirms Kim Stafford’s feelings when he received the galley of his memoir. Silverman says, “I could hold this book, this tangible thing. And it takes it out of you. It’s like writing that pressure out of the pressure cooker. Each word that comes out is like taking a little piece of pain with it and putting it on the page. Which isn’t to say that you don’t still have feelings about it. Of course you do. But it just takes away a lot of that power it has over you, and you feel a kind of distance towards it. Now when I think about my father and incest, I think about, okay, now wait, what page is that on?”
She twists around in her desk chair and gestures behind her to the open-backed shelves stacked with books. “It’s like, yeah I remember it in the real world, but it’s more like: it’s over there. It’s in the bookcase.”
There’s so much beauty in Silverman’s metaphor. Her story is something she looks at on her terms. Something she can choose to take off the shelf. And something she can always choose to put back.
Those books on Silverman’s bookshelf have had a profound impact on the people who’ve read them. An impact that Silverman did not anticipate. “I really had no idea what to expect. I thought I would get a few literary reviews, give a few readings, and call it a day.”
Instead, after writing Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, she was inundated with letters, hundreds of them, from people, mainly women, thanking her for giving voice to their experiences. “They feel that because they don’t have that voice and they don’t write, my book comforts them, which I find so sweet and empowering and endearing. They can say, ‘Thank you for telling your story because I feel that my story is also out there.’”
The media response to Love Sick was slightly different. Silverman admits to a few uncomfortable radio interviews where, instead of sympathizing with her addiction, “shock jocks” asked her some markedly humiliating questions about her sex life. But overall, Love Sick produced similar responses to those she’d had with Terror. “I’ll get e-mails from people who say, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea why I was having these affairs or doing this stuff, but because of your book, I realize I’ve got the same problem that you have.’” Silverman’s story gives these people hope that they can find a path to recovery through therapy, too. She says those sorts of responses far outweigh the indignity she experienced with a few interview questions asked in poor taste. “The important thing, and what you have to keep your eye on, is the fact that you can write a book that touches people.” She pauses, then, her face breaking into a brilliant smile, she exclaims, “Can you ask for more as a writer? That’s just so moving.”
With what I recognize as characteristic humility, Silverman says, “Growing up, I was just this pathetic little kid. I got terrible grades. I got the worst SAT scores in the history of the universe. I never studied. I didn’t know who I was. I was just limping through life. So I often ask myself, How did this happen? How did I even get a teaching job? It’s just all amazing, and I would not have anticipated any of it.”
She goes on to say that she never would have expected, almost twenty years after the publication of Terror, someone like me to both be reading it and asking about it. “Even though your background isn’t mine and mine isn’t yours, there’s so much common ground from those universal emotions and feelings—alienation, loss, grief.” Silverman’s compassion and generosity of spirit is so clear. “It’s an honor that people want to tell me their stories, too, and that they trust me enough to do so.”
Writing her memoirs and recognizing that people will place her in unforeseen roles, such as spokesperson or advocate, have given Silverman an important understanding about how readers see her and how she sees herself: “I’ve let any worry about [people’s expectations] go. Every book is me, but not the whole me.” Incest and sex addiction are not the only defining factors to her personhood. Writing about those slices of her life has cleared the way for her to see other slices of herself, too, and she continues to write about them. She alludes to a fourth memoir in the works, what she describes as “a story I’m still trying to find my way through” that explores, among other things, getting older and her bizarre fear of dying. “I feel confident now that it’s going to find its way,” she says. “That it’s going to be a cohesive something.”
Silverman the writing teacher now enters our discussion. “You will find more stories, too, because there is more to you than just this one thing,” she assures me. “In some ways you can’t see it yet, which is good because you do need to focus on what you need to focus on now. And then more stories will come.”
Our conversation is drawing to a close, and I’m down to my last question. “Is there anything else you’d like me to know that I haven’t thought to ask?”
In her answer, I’m anticipating maybe more discussion about her latest stories, more information about her newest memoir. But instead, Silverman leans closer, her sweet face filling my laptop screen, her brown eyes full of light, and she says, “I want you to know that you can do it. You can.”
My eyes fill with unexpected tears.
“It is lonely and it’s hard to be a writer,” Silverman continues, seeing the rawness of my emotion. “You have to know that you are the same as me. I’m the same as you. It doesn’t matter that I’ve published a book or not. It doesn’t matter. We’re all writers. We are all in this together. We help each other. We lift each other. You know, I will be thinking about you a lot and cheering you on,” she says, and I am again so struck by her kindness. “What you are doing is really important. You can do this. You are not alone. You will do this.”
I love these generous words. Words from a wise and compassionate writer who deeply understands how hard it is to travel the lonely road of writing a hard story. Their sincerity washes over me. I feel a tiny sprout of confidence poking through my doubts, and in that briefest of moments, I believe her.