Content warnings

This block of text below is just one of the content warnings in my book,

To the Man I Called Father.

The following chapter contains the most explicit material in the book.

It reproduces, in the perpetrator's own words as recorded by the child victim, the language used during repeated acts of sexual abuse, including sexual coercion, threats, and references to assault and bleeding. It also references suicide — both the victim's later thoughts of ending her life and the perpetrator's threats of self-harm used as coercion. It contains a portrait of the perpetrator created by the victim. Some readers may want to skip this chapter or read it with support. Resources are included in the back of the book. I debated many times whether to include it in its entirety, but to change it would be to diminish what she survived. My daughter chose to record my father's words and render his portrait to communicate to me, her own father, the horrors she could not speak.

The truth is, I almost cut one of the hardest chapters in my book.

It reproduces my father's own words from the years he abused my daughter — recorded by her, in her own hand, because they were horrors she couldn't say out loud.

Every instinct I had as her father said to soften it, to look away, to spare everyone the worst of it.

It's part of the reason I wrote under a pseudonym to be able to tell the truth without my daughter having to face it again.

But to not include it—or to change her words, would have been to diminish what she survived.

So I left them exactly as she wrote them—and I put a very detailed Content Warning in front of them.

I’m not sure how anyone feels about content warnings. Initially, I assumed, “It’s a trauma memoir, what kind of content are they expecting?”

But after reading through it the first time, then again through my daughter's lens, I knew it would need one.

There are a few in the book, but this particular one has gotten a lot more attention—a lot more scrutiny.

Early on, my daughter couldn't speak the words of what had been done to her. So she chose art—our shared language.

She chose to create a portrait of my father and surround him with his own words— the words he used when he abused her.

She chose art so she could communicate with me, her father, the things she could not speak.

How could I not include it exactly as she created it?