OBJECT

Duncombe discusses the long process of coping with sexual trauma.

In 1979, when the author was 10, she and her family left Washington, D.C., for the Ivory Coast. Her father worked for the United States Foreign Service, and his career took the family to such far-flung places as Indonesia and India. Life at the U.S. Embassy in Abidjan seemed pleasant, but all was not well below the surface—the author states that she was a preteen when a friend’s father began to molest her. This man, Bill, tended to be a hit with kids due to his own childlike nature; further down the road, several other girls shared similar stories of abuse. Bill was reassigned with his family to a position in Washington. The Foreign Service would not press charges, and Bill did not even lose his job. The author goes back and forth in the memoir between these traumatic events and more recent occurrences. By 2016, Duncombe was a psychotherapist living in Geneva, Switzerland, with her two children and her husband. After she and her husband underwent a separation, she reentered the dating world; the text describes these experiences alongside a reexamination of the author’s past. Details are not glossed over, and Duncombe even allows for occasional humor. (One date in Geneva decided the author needed a spanking. The author states, “I most definitely did not want a little spank”; she felt “absurd as my flesh jiggled with each slap.”) The intensely personal material is raw and gutsy. Of one unsettling sexual encounter, Duncombe writes: “I squeezed my eyes closed, praying for it to be over.” There are blander scenes, as when the author takes a predictably awkward Krav Maga class with her teenage son. Still, the work contains a great deal of substance.

A highly revealing account of abuse and the struggle to overcome it.