Dancing with the Octopus

Starred review from June 8, 2020
In this intense debut memoir, Harding writes of the aftermath of a traumatic experience as a teenager. In 1978, at age 14, she was abducted from a church across the street from her Omaha school by a ski-masked stranger, 17-year-old Charles Goodwin. He rapes her and demands ransom from her parents before tying her up and leaving her near a set of train tracks. Goodwin, who had a criminal record and served in juvenile detention, was far from Harding’s only source of trauma, though. Harding recounts heartbreaking tales of her abusive, mentally ill mother, who locked her and her sisters in an unheated garage during the winter as punishment for minor offenses. “They say with severe crimes there’s no avoiding the aftermath,” Harding writes. “What they don’t say is how post-traumatic stress can become a disorder because of your childhood family, the one you’re trying to survive.” Even as she fears for her own mental state, struggles with PTSD, and loses her father to suicide, Harding breaks the cycle of abuse taught to her by her dysfunctional family, and she is now happily in a healthy relationship. This moving story of grit and resilience will resonate with readers long after the final page is turned.

June 15, 2020
A powerful account of sexual assault and decades of lingering trauma. The opening of Harding's memoir, told in brief episodes, finds her confronting Charles, who, when she was a young teenager, kidnapped and raped her--and, we learn, surely would have killed her had she not escaped. There he sat, imprisoned, nonchalantly, "as if he were waiting there just for me in the same way he'd been that afternoon, twenty-five years ago, when our paths happened to cross." The author reconstructs the terrible events of the assault, unpremeditated only to the extent that she just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time as Charles, recently released from juvenile detention, acted out his pent-up rage. Complicating the tale is a home life that might have seemed normal to a casual observer but that was not: Her unhinged, raging mother "beat my legs with a belt so bad I had to cover them up at school the next day" while her father did little to protect her from that constant wrath. Still, in the aftermath of that night in 1978, Harding forged a deep connection with him: "The crime had been important to my relationship with my father, forged an inseparable bond, and now it explained my unshakable loyalty to him," she writes. All of these threads have unhappy resolutions even as Harding tries to get at the root of the debilitating anxiety that ensued years later. She decides that one key to restoring her health was to follow the tenets of "restorative justice," one aspect of which is to face one's attacker and hold a dialogue--in this case one that took place just before his release from prison, testing whether the transformation from violent youth to spiritual adult he said he underwent was genuine at all. A thoughtfully told story that may inspire others to find healing in the wake of savage crime.

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