NO ONE CROSSES THE WOLF

A memoir about confronting trauma and working toward healing.

In this frank and often searing narrative, Nikolidakis examines what she describes as monstrous abuses perpetrated by her father, who, after leaving her family, murdered his new girlfriend and her daughter before committing suicide. Setting forth “my truth—the emotional truth of my experiences,” the author recounts how she was stunned by the violence that might easily have included her or other family members and slowly began a painful investigation into the wide-ranging impact of her father’s malignancy. She insightfully explores her family’s well-concealed dysfunction, her descent into alcoholism and promiscuity as a teenager, and her long-standing efforts to deny the reality of the psychological and physical torments. Particularly vivid (and harrowing) are those passages that reflect on the divide between her father’s charismatic public presence and the cruelty of his private life. With compelling clarity and eloquence, she anatomizes his ability to manipulate: “I remember nearly a dozen such apologies from those years, each of them cried and slumped, his head held and bowed until I offered forgiveness. I always did, partly because it got him out of my room, but mostly because I believed him. To see grief so close up, to inspect it and work out the algebra of its accuracy, filled me with shame, as though lying near his shame released its contagion.” Nikolidakis concludes by explaining how her search for understanding took her to her father’s homeland in Greece and Crete, where she found a sense of spiritual renewal in reconnecting with his extended family. The text is convincing and memorable in suggesting that the author was, ultimately, able to accept the final unknowability of what drove her father’s destructiveness and to transcend the rage and self-loathing he wrought.

A brave and inspiring account of a movement through pain to a complex reckoning and self-recovery.