26 LISTENER AUGUST 3 2019
through my rage about it. All that stuff
took stages and time. Nobody had written
a book like this. It would have been differ-
ent if someone had said, ‘You can actually
do this and save yourself all those stages.’”H
er father died in 1988. “We’d been
estranged for a while. As a matter of
fact, no one told me he was dying.
They told me a couple of days after he
died. And he didn’t believe in things
like memorials.” There was no goodbye.
“There’s that passage in the book with me
sitting in his closet, smelling his sweater,
just trying to make sense of it and let go
of it. Which I believe is really what he
wanted – to leave his poisons in me. He
succeeded for a long time.”
Before he died, he cut her out of his will
and tried to ensure his abuse was buried
with him. “He was saying to my mother,
‘If she says anything to you, don’t believe
her.’ My mother said, had he not said that
to her, she wouldn’t have believed me. It
was so obvious.”
He always called her a liar. “It never
made sense to me, because I was scrupu-
lously, obsessively honest. Because I didn’t
want to be hurt.” Finally she understood.
“He didn’t want people to believe me
when I finally told. He had to delegitimise
me so I would never be believed.” The
book was, in part, about freeing herself
from who he told her she was. “Exactly.”
The sexual abuse started when she was
five. That stopped when she was 10. She
cut off her hair, became truculent, he
punched her in the face and the beatings
began. The Apology is an exposition of an
adoring father turned monster. “You were
an angel descended to save my soul and
I yearned for salvation,” he says. And: “I
told myself you wanted this.” It’s uncom-
fortably, unflinchingly graphic, describing
not just the abuser’s response but the
confused response, at first, of the child.
Has she had any negative response
to going into such fraught territory? “I
was anticipating that and so far it has
not happened. I think it’s so clear, that
complexity, it just screws your mind so
badly. If it were just horrible, you could
walk away and be done, but because there
is some pleasure involved in it – it’s your
father, for god’s sake, the person you love
most in the world – it explodes your mind
and confuses you for a long, long time
after. I think it’s so implicit in the book,
and that is maybe why people haven’tgotten upset about it.” It was the hardest
part to write. “I wanted to tell the truth.
And the truth has so many layers. I kept
going back to that section, to just get my
father to go deeper. Like, ‘You haven’t
really told this completely. Let’s go deeper,
down another floor.’” It forces a reader to
have to try to make sense of what hap-
pened. “Exactly. We’re so scared to think
about what these things are. It’s ironic.
You have to step into the mess in order
to be freed from it. When you start to get
very detailed and specific, they lose their
ability to control us.”She makes him say what a little girl
longed to hear: “Let me get it right this
time”, “Let me be staggered by your ten-
derness”, “I’m sorry”.
Now she’s the one in control and he
is consigned to a desolate, lonely limbo,
“Floating, unmoored, spinning ...” Is
there an element of revenge in finally
bending her tormentor to her will? “No,”
she says, sharply. “No. I didn’t want to
do a book that was revengeful. I made
a determination that whatever he was
doing, I would do the opposite. My father
was a very vengeful person. I vowed I
would never be vengeful.”
So, does that mean she has forgiven the
plainly unforgivable? “I’ve always been
wary of the word forgiveness. It’s some-
thing that often gets mandated – man
being the operative word – on survivors of
all kinds. ‘You should forgive’, ‘Why don’t
you just forgive, already’, blah blah blah. I
really don’t know what forgiving some-
one means. What I do understand is the
alchemy of an apology.”
The book is meant to act as a model for
a process on the part of the perpetrator
that is detailed, forensic, accountable. “If
someone feels the effect their behaviours
have on you, and lets themselves be opento that feeling, and then takes full respon-
sibility, there is this alchemy that occurs.
Any rancour or bitterness or hate gets
released in that moment. If that’s forgive-
ness, I’m all for it.”
In a time of no platforming, the book
gives a platform to her perpetrator, even
if channelled through her. Not everyone
would do that. “I can only say that I
respect and honour survivors’ feelings and
everyone must choose. I’ve been doingthis work, it feels like, forever and if we do
not get under why people are doing this,
and if we do not start looking at the seeds
of patriarchal abuse, we’re going to be
here forever.” So, her father speaks about
his boyhood. He was the idolised son of
an Austrian father and a German mother.
His mother’s golden boy. His parents fol-
lowed the parenting advice of a German
physician who favoured discipline for
babies of the no cuddles, no comforting
variety.
Her father was spoilt, special, emo-
tionally deprived: a toxic combination.
Gaining understanding was painful. “It
was hard to feel for him as a boy. It was
hard to say, ‘Oh my god, my father hurt.’
I would have liked to stay away from that.
But it was in that that I really began to get
free.” Those feelings are there, anyway.
“We know our perpetrators better than
we know anyone else in the world. Their
feelings are stored in us because they don’t
feel their feelings. We do. So, in a way, I
got to give my father back his feelings. It
was, like, ‘Go, take them. They’re yours,JO not mine.’”
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Before he died,
he cut her out
of his will and
tried to ensure
his abuse was
buried with him.