My Father's House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing

In a memory breakthrough, Canadian novelist Fraser (Berlin Solstice, etc.) realized as she began her sixth novel, one dealing with incest, that she was recalling her own experience with her father, which amnesia had concealed for 40 years from her consciousness. The author recounts how her personality at the time split in two with the creation of a second self that assumed the repellent relationship with her father, although it surfaced in sudden rages and convulsions, and later, despite a happy marriage, in inexplicable depressions and sexual violence in her fiction. With compelling novelistic impact, Fraser relates through ever more portentous and specific dreams and mysterious forebodings the shattering moment of revelation 10 years after her father's death. Acknowledgment brought not only liberation of the other, long-suppressed self but forgiveness for her father and for herself. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild featured alternate; author tour. (June)