cover image Broken Child

Broken Child

Marcia Cameron. Zebra, $20 (396pp) ISBN 978-0-8217-4826-8

This account of multiple personality disorder and child abuse is intensely moving, exhausting and powerful. When the author was three, her German mother, Gisela, an ardent Nazi who moved to Southern California in 1936, began to torture her--knifing and burning Marcia's flesh, mutilating her genitals and locking her in a closet for hours while Marcia's father, Frank, a German-Jewish immigrant lawyer, was at work. Marcia Cameron (a pseudonym) split into multiple selves--promiscuous, reckless Emily; thumb-sucking Sunshine, an eternal six-year-old; Sophie, a loving Jewish mother; Camille, a blind girl; condescending, four-times-baptized Muriel; and Joey, an angry, food-obsessed Jewish boy. When Marcia, at 13, told her father about Gisela's abuse, he left his wife, taking Marcia and her two brothers with him. A year later, Frank died and Marcia returned to her mother. At 18, spinal meningitis and a coma led to speech and motor impairment, and Marcia was raped several times while hospitalized. Although she eventually married and had a son and daughter, her life was punctuated by dissociative episodes, suicide attempts, ``Emily's'' affairs and a succession of inept psychotherapists. Through six years with San Francisco psychiatrist Steinman, she integrated many of her personalities and continues to heal. (Feb.)