Eleanor Hill

A powerful book, difficult to review - it’s an account of growing up as an incest victim, her testimony. Her father was acknowledged by everyone in the family to be high strung, nervous, artistic, charming. The only thing that helped him calm down was oral sex with his eldest daughter. He would tell her how sorry he was, how he wished he didn’t need to do this, but he had to. She was the only one who understood him, and got special trips and gifts. As she grew older he was strict, keeping her away from boys who would “want one thing” from her and not appreciate how he’d kept her pure.
She didn’t get to spend much time with people her age and was socially awkward, always feeling out of step, always drawn back to her father until she finally made a break.
At the end of the book she and her father are estranged, but she muses “Funny how I see it all in a certain way just now. That it is too bad fathers and daughters can’t be lovers. Forever. They must each go off, each searching for a kind of love they never find again, one that came so easy and natural.”
She wrote another memoir, about her marriage, which I very much want to read, and some works of fiction.… (meer)

The Family Secret (isbn 978-0-930012-21-2) was a Rhodora prize-winning book in the days when incest was whispered about. This reprint edition tells the full story from the point of view of the victim over a 20-year period. Eleanore Hill tells the story from the inside, and the effect that it had on her life, or when she was old enough to begin dating. This brave account does not sensationalize the issue, rather it puts it on a personal level. To live through it, through the revealing of the secret, and to go ahead with marriage, family, and a productive life—that is the power of the story.

In a later book, the story of the marriage unfolds as the standards for sexuality undergo stress and change as well. The Last American Housewife shows the sincere effort to live up to an image of family life that was fading even as the marriage began.… (meer)