Jaycee Dugard's Memoir: A Stolen Life reviewed by Janet Maslin

image from New York Times

Jaycee Dugard has written a miraculous memoir after being abducted, raped and forced to bear and birth two ( innocent and hopefully much loved ) children beginning age 14 to her demented captor, X. The man (and his wife, co-conspirator) deserves no recognition. Jaycee was eleven when she was tasered, dragged into a car and brought to live for the next 18 years in his backyard. The fact that she survived mentally or emotionally intact enough to even begin to address what happened to her, much less write a memoir about it- is a miracle, and a testament to her resilience and strength.

Her story has been reviewed in The New York Times by Janet Maslin, a short review with a brisk style of summarizing one of the most emotionally brutalizing and maiming life stories I have ever encountered. I thought a few times, reading the review, that Mrs. Maslin was underwhelming in her interpretation of the memoir, the author and the experience that Ms. Dugard was recalling; Mrs. Maslin left out emphasis terrifically important when considering this memoir; she approaches once only the subject of trauma's wounds to a person's brain: “With some help, I have come to realize that my perspective is unique to abduction,” Ms. Dugard writes at the start of the book. That means that her memories are fragmented and incomplete, since she often had only a narrow idea of what went on around her."

A Stolen Life is also a stolen mind- the wounds of severe, ongoing trauma are as profound to the brain as they are the soul. Every example that is criticized in Mrs. Maslin's review must also be seen through the lens of this understanding to be correctly reflected on- criticisms such as: Her diary entries include the lines “I would do it all again,” “I don’t understand why I’m not happy” and “What do I have to complain about?” But “A Stolen Life” almost makes sense of those words.

Almost? Understated in the best light, the use of the word 'almost' is almost insulting to anyone who has experienced great emotional trauma. The brain will do amazing and miraculous, confounding and horrible things in the wake of ongoing suffering, and the kind of deeply neurological confusion and shadow-playing that her heartbreaking diary lines reveal does not warrant minimization like that. To be taken ( from a home that was so emotionally barren that Mrs. Maslin asks 'Where would she go?' if Jaycee had managed to escape) and dragged into an alternate universe where you are raped by a man who then gives you 'privacy' to clean yourself up is to test the boundries of the mind to comprehend reality. Adults in torture imprisonments often lose grip on reality. - Jaycee was eleven.

Mrs. Maslin goes on to write: As it progresses from the shock of Ms. Dugard’s early years with the Garridos to the weird domesticity of her later ones, “A Stolen Life” makes enough sharply insightful observations to offset vapid ones. This is a fascinating critique. How can the point of view of a young woman severely degraded and abused for her entire coming of age, kept in solitary confinement with the exception of being raped and then forced to give the name Momma to her rapist's wife, how can her observations on her life be, at any point, vapid? The words may be vapid. But to take the words out of the context of the author- Jaycee Dugard- is to rip the soul out of the book, to deny the great and powerful mangling of a human being's capacity for 'normal' thought and feeling when repeatedly viciously abused as a child. Mrs. Dugard asks 'What would you do to survive?' and I think the only fair and honest answer any of us can give is along the lines of I don't know. Anything and everything, nothing- I. Don't. Know. And only those who have the horrible key to that answer have earned the right to judge.