books – Valerie Dimino

Wishing You Anger and Inspiration

My debut book is out(!) — and its content packs a punch. A story like this may upset you or inspire you. I hope it will do both.

The Man Behind the Curtain is a memoir I coauthored for a survivor of sexual abuse whose family and community tried to silence her when the truth came out. As I’ve blogged about before — in introducing you to Jessica and in interviewing her as we neared the finish line — there’s no denying that this is difficult subject matter, and that’s precisely why we felt it needed to be heard.

For too many years, Jessica was the one made to feel guilty about what had been done to her, including feeling guilty if she tried to talk about it — even long after the abuse had been reported and investigated, even long after her rapist stepfather was convicted and imprisoned. The people who continue (yes, present tense) to revere her abuser and portray Jessica as a liar have made grand attempts to shame her into continued silence. As I write about in the book’s afterword, Jessica told me in one of our early meetings, “Every time I tell my story, I apologize for my story.”

This is maddening. Jessica knew it wasn’t right but had to wrestle with that for years, often alone. I knew it wasn’t right upon my first meeting with her, scribbling down page after page of notes by hand as the earliest notion of a book took shape. Now our readers are experiencing that fury, too — and I must say, I love to hear that.

“I was so enraged I wanted to throw the book across the room on multiple occasions,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote, “This book will make you angry. And it should. A brutally honest depiction of the abuse that a young girl faced, and the heartbreaking account of those closest to her who refused to believe it.”

I want you to feel angry. I also want you to feel proud of Jessica, as I do and as so many readers have told us they do, and cheer for her as she finds her courage and her voice amidst all of those causes of anger.

And I want you to know that Jessica’s story, as shocking and infuriating as it is, is not unique. I want you to be all the angrier to think about the countless others who have lived a story like this or are currently living it. And I want you to be all the more inspired and hopeful and proud to think about each one of those people stepping into their own power. Jessica and I hope that a book like ours helps them, and their loved ones, along that journey. As we write in the book’s last chapter, we’re aiming to “help others take their own first step — or second, or hundredth — toward healing, and toward hope.”

Michelle Bowdler’s memoir, Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto, served as a torch guiding my way through my research and writing. In an essay she wrote for Lit Hub, “When Your Memoir Has the Word ‘Rape’ in the Title,” Michelle addresses a struggle similar to Jessica’s: “The temptation to hide the word because the reality of rape is so horrific only made it more critical that it stood front and center in my book. As it was in my life, it would be in my words. If I hid the word rape and its impact on me, it would make anything about my life a lie, an omission, a nod to shame and silence.”

In working to suppress the shame and self-doubt, people like Michelle and Jessica used something terrible as a catalyst for something great, providing a guiding light to other survivors who are still trying to find their way through.

I see a similar light emerging from the darkness when I watch a woman address her church about the abuse their pastor inflicted upon her as a teen, or when I read about the reckoning currently unfolding for the Southern Baptist Convention — which encompasses Jessica’s family’s church — about sexual abuse from the highest ranks, covered up for decades by its executive committee. When I hear these stories, I am simultaneously furious and hopeful, with each emotion amplifying the other. I’m honored if our book can evoke a similar cycle of feelings for our readers.

Yes, the things Jessica experienced can be difficult to hear about. The fact that she and too many other people have lived those difficult things makes it imperative that others of us are willing to hear about them and discuss them. We may not always understand or know what to say. We may feel powerless in response to such horrible things. But we can listen. That seemingly simple action holds a lot of power.

In listening, we acknowledge the victim as a fellow human being with a story bigger than their abuse, with a life still to be made. We bear witness, we learn, we grow.

Another reviewer of our book wrote, “This is admittedly a tough read from an emotional standpoint, but it is well worth the pain to read how Jessica persevered.”

Jessica and I are both so grateful to our readers for being willing to take this emotional journey with us. Collectively, we come out the other side of it stronger. I hope continuing to share stories like this helps us find a way forward, toward a time when there are far fewer of them to tell.

Instagram quote card showcasing a reader review of THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: "I was so enraged I wanted to throw the book across the room on multiple occasions..."

Great Expectations of the Content We Consume

I’ve written before about the mixed emotions I feel as I near the end of a good book: there’s excitement to find out how it will end, a little worry as to whether I’ll be satisfied with that ending, and also a particular sort of sadness, deep in my rib cage, about parting ways with it. When I’m immersed in a great read, it can be so absorbing that I can’t help but leave part of my mind in the book’s world as I’m moving about in my own; the characters’ voices and predicaments continue to play out as if on a TV screen in the corner. I find myself wondering about them — how they’re feeling, what will happen to them. The haze of that other realm, the texture of the language, follow me around and beckon me to come back soon.

This is often true of TV shows and movies, too. While I enjoy creating my own vision in my head while I’m reading, the provided visuals and audio of the screen add so many more crevices to explore and cozy up with: the costumes, the sets, the actors’ vocal inflections and facial expressions, the music… (The music is utterly essential — I’m planning another post soon about the infinite ways music is tied to emotion and memory. Stay tuned!) Friends, The Office, Community, Gilmore Girls — I came to care about those characters and their worlds so deeply that I felt as if I truly knew them.

One of the things I’ve missed most during the pandemic is going to the movies. In recent years, I became a proponent of going to the movie theater alone. It’s the best way to allow yourself to become fully transported into the story. This is how I experienced some of my favorite films of the past few years: A Star Is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman (no coincidence about the run of music movies!), and my second viewing of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (which I found mostly to be lovely but in many ways to fall short of the 1994 version, which happens to be my favorite movie of all time). I’m excited to say I recently ventured out to resurrect this tradition and see In the Heights. (Highly recommend.) As the opening musical number swelled and reverberated through the room, I was buzzing with adrenaline and such profound gratitude. I would argue that going to see a movie alone is nearly on par with attending a live concert in terms of savoring a fully immersive consumption of entertainment. And it’s a consumption of content — as a writer, it always comes back to that for me. Someone else has created this piece — these words, notes, visuals, etc. — and, in sharing it, has added content to my life. They have imparted an experience.

The ability of words on a page (or acted out on a screen, as the case may be) to make us laugh or cry or gasp is what solidified my dream of being a writer. I read a sappy Lurlene McDaniel novel in junior high and remember crying actual, full-fledged tears when one of the main characters died — and immediately afterward feeling a full-bodied awe at the fact that those tears were brought about by symbols on paper. I’d always been an avid reader and enjoyed making up poems and stories of my own, but that was the moment I knew: I want to do THIS.

We invest so much of ourselves in all of these types of content that it’s only natural to have such high demands of them — we invest not just time but emotion: hope, curiosity, vulnerability, the expectation of some sort of escape. We don’t want to be let down by the writers, the characters, the actors; we feel appreciative when they come through for us and impart an impactful experience.

The other side of that coin is that when we finish good content of any type, there is a mourning period of sorts. We emerge from that other world we’ve inhabited for however many hours and have to adjust to being back in our own familiar surroundings, often with a pang of longing — something, already, like nostalgia — for the friends and atmosphere we’d come to know.

For me, though, the most exciting part of finishing a book is picking out which one I’ll read next. I’m a bit of a book hoarder. My multiple bookshelves are stuffed with favorites I hope to reread someday (or simply feel I must own, even if they don’t get reread in their entirety) and many, many books that I haven’t yet read. A small sampling — maybe 20 or so — are promoted to my bedside shelf as a sort of holding area for what’s to be read soon. There’s a pressure of sorts, an eagerness that borders on anxiety, as to picking the next read. What about all those others still waiting? Is this the one I’m ready for next? Choosing the next show or movie to cross off my to-watch list is a similar struggle. The thrill and uncertainty of these decisions, every time, speaks to the power that quality content has over us.

What great reads or binge-watches have you gotten lost in lately? Share your favorites with me — so I can add them to my ever-overflowing queues, calling to me as they wait in the wings.

Cheryl Strayed’s WILD: A Journey of a Thousand Miles Propels a Journey Inward

I recently finished reading Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, which had been on my to-read list since it was first published in 2012. (As an English major, I’m ashamed to admit that I saw the movie before reading the book. I do highly recommend both.) For those unfamiliar, a woefully oversimplified summary is that it’s about Strayed’s experiences hiking more than 1,000 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, alone and inexperienced, after the devastating death of her mother and dissolution of her marriage. As the book jacket states, “Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.” How soothing to think of strength and healing as the resolution after madness. That’s precisely the kind of journey Strayed takes us on.

I had the pleasure of hearing Strayed read from the book and speak about it as part of SUNY Brockport’s Writers Forum series in 2013. I was struck by how humble, approachable, and normal she was; after having completed this astounding journey, I thought she would seem somehow otherworldly, untouchable. I was awe-struck by what she’d accomplished. But as she talked about what it was like to stagger under the weight of a backpack so heavy she couldn’t lift it from the floor — she calls the approach she eventually managed to adopt “hunching in a remotely upright position” — it was like she answered my thoughts of Wow, how did she do all of that? with her own enthralled gush of, I know, right?!

That humility is present throughout the book and kept me mesmerized by Strayed’s narrative voice. She acknowledges her own amazement and gratitude about being on that hike, her unpreparedness for it and how that added to its impact on her. She knows she wasn’t well suited for it on paper, but that was one of the very reasons she knew she needed to do it. Which, to me, means she had exactly the right kind of mind for it, and the rest she figured out along the way.

One of my favorite moments is when she describes settling in at her campsite one night, 7,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada mountain range:

“The silence was tremendous. The absence felt like a weight.”

How brave of her to go willingly into that silence, to take that journey inward — accompanied only by a constant soundtrack of her own thoughts, memories, pains, regrets — in order to better understand all that is happening around her. Having gone through a few major life changes myself in recent years (exhibit A and exhibit B, among others), I’ve sometimes felt drawn to the idea of that sort of exploration — a long trip somewhere new all alone, a drive on unfamiliar roads with no destination in mind — but I have yet to conquer the self-doubt that inevitably creeps in as to what it would require of me and reveal to me.

Another favorite moment is when she meets a 5-year-old boy on the trail who sings her a song his mother taught him after learning that Strayed is grieving the loss of her own mother.

She describes him singing “in a voice so pure that I felt gutted” and says she felt “half demolished by the time he finished.”

I love this description of something being so beautiful and moving that it’s painful. That’s how I feel about Strayed’s writing. Her craft is so good, so finely tuned, that it hurts; it’s the kind of beauty that punches you and leaves you stinging.

As I neared the final chapters, I experienced that wonderful juxtaposition of emotions stirred up by a great read: I was eager to learn how it would end and yet reluctant to part ways with it. As I read the last few paragraphs — and immediately read them again — I felt gutted. I felt I was mourning a loss. Like Strayed, I was in awe of the journey and grateful to have experienced it.

Reaching the end of her hike and trying to process its finality, she writes:

“There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.”

Oof. Doesn’t that so accurately describe, with such aching beauty, any sort of loss? There is no route back to before it was gone, no choice but to continue moving forward, no matter how uncertain the steps may sometimes seem.