Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir

摘要

It's fashionable to suggest that memoir writers begin by making sure the events of their lives merit examination. No one could lob this accusation at Fragoso, whose Tiger, Tiger details the years she spent at the mercy of a pedophile, Peter Curran, with whom she had a "relationship" from the time she was 7 until she was 22. But is it as dangerous to lyricize trauma as it is to lack it? Fragoso's Curran is less monster than pied piper, an eye-crinkling playmate who makes her world "ecstatic." His suicide leaves Fragoso "chasing the ghost of how it felt… like the earth is scorched and the grass won't grow back." This prose, overly worked, keeps Curran at a pretty distance. His ugliness remains as unfathomable to us as it would to any child.