Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday October 4, 2010
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MY LIE: A True Story of False Memory
Meredith Maran
Jossey-Bass
ISBN 978-0470502143
260 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
One of the more bizarre stories of the 1980s and '90s was the widespread conviction that day-care centers had become hotbeds of sexual abuse, all memory of which the young victims had suppressed until prompted by therapists to break down the walls of resistance. A related phenomenon was the one Meredith Maran writes about in "My Lie": accusations of incest against family members, in this case her father, with -- again -- memory of the incidents needing to be awakened by therapy.
Maran had originally taken an interest in child abuse as a journalist. Soon she became fascinated by the McMartin case, in which therapists "used hand puppets and anatomically correct dolls to help the children describe what had happened to them." Reading about this and similar cases caused Maran to fret about her uneasy relationship with her dad: He hadn't just tried to control her life, she came to think; he had abused her sexually. She let him know of her belief via her mother and refused even to speak with him for 10 years. "It is natural that you have periodic doubts of your experience," reassured one of the many books she read on the subject. "But that's because accepting memories is painful, not because you weren't abused."
Yet even so Maran did have doubts, which became stronger the more she looked into the issue. For instance, according to a 2007 news article, "A team of psychiatrists and literary scholars reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory, fictional or not, before the year 1800." The study team suggested that repressed memory is "a culture-bound syndrome and not a natural process of human memory." In other words, the alleged victims had been coached. Finally, Maran sought out her old therapist, who explained, "There was so much pressure during those years to try and find incest memories in every client. In the therapeutic community in the late 1980s and early 1990s, incest was this cookie-cutter answer to every woman's problems." Fortunately, Maran explains, "When I came to my senses, my father was still alive and relatively well. I still had time to make amends."
Dennis Dravelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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101 PLACES NOT TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE
Catherine Price
Harper
ISBN 978-0061787768
249 pages
$13.99
Reviewed by T. Rees Shapiro
Catherine Price, a blogger, traveler and freelance writer , realized a little bit ago that "the last thing I need to read is a book that pits my desire for adventure against the time pressure of mortality." Books such as "100 Places to See in Your Lifetime" and "101 Places to Have Sex Before You Die," she concluded, stressed her out. Her solution was to write an antithesis, a compilation of experiences and situations readers never need relish: hence "101 Places Not to See Before You Die."
Much-visited entries in her avoid list include Euro Disney, Times Square on New Years Eve, Ireland's Blarney Stone, Stonehenge and the entire state of Nevada. Many of the entries are weird and funny ("Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiberglass Thing"), but some aren't, such as Hell, an AA Meeting When You're Drunk and the Inside of a Spotted Hyena's Birth Canal.
The book is seemingly well researched, so you can take her word for it when Price says you can skip a Giant Room Filled with Human Crap (a sludge-recycling plant in Southern California); the Testicle Festival, where revelers chow down on Rocky Mountain Oysters, which, Price clarifies, are not a "high-altitude mollusk"; and Your Boss's Bedroom.
T. Rees Shapiro can be reached at shapirot(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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