Tiger, Tiger

Very good story about child abuse!
It is told from two viewpoints… once of them being from a child’s viewpoint… and the other from the adult that realizes what happened to her as a kid.
Heartbreaking, most of the time. But it’s also an important read. The level of manipulation that the predator used to seduce children is just uncanny! The social worker is the hero of the story… but she is also powerless since the victims do not believe they are being used. The social worker is also powerless because the family is turning a blind eye to all of the abuse. It’s willful blindness.

I know this might sound wrong… but I think it’s more important that a child who is being abused read this book… it might help open their eyes and result in the child talking to the social worker. A lot of the contents of this book made me sick to my stomach.

The predator always has an excuse for everything that he does. A believable excuse. A child could be easily fooled. But this book shows where the more elaborate traps are! The traps are 1. the Predators knowledge of child psychology, 2. the family who is engaged in willful blindness. 3. a child’s lack of understanding about what is actually happening to them.

There were a few heroes other than the social worker. There was the lifeguard who reported what he had witnessed. But the abuse was allowed to continue on for years.

To be a sex goddess you had to view the world coldly yet treat it with overabundant affection; you had to be brashly childlike yet clearly womanly; you had to pretend you expected nothing, but in reality accept nothing less than everything; you had to tease and charm and flirt and whimper and coo and goad everyone you met. – Tiger, Tiger.

REVIEW: Tiger, Tiger is Margaux Fragosos memoir about her 15 year relationship with a pedophile. When Margaux met this man, she was only 7-years-old and he 51. The book talks about Margauxs experience throughout her life including the impact that the trauma has had on her.

This book highlights the cycle of abuse, dysfunctional family relationships, and complexities of multigenerational abuse. It is definitely a hard read, and at some points frustrating to see how each small choice the adults in Margauxs life made, led her down this path. While this book follows her life up until the age of 22, I would have liked to see more about her life after the abuse ended, and the journey towards healing.

Overall, I would recommend this book to others who are interested in an own-voices story about being a victim of pedophilia.

SYNOPSIS: I still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time.

At two in the afternoon, when he would come and pick me up and take me for rides; at five, when I would read to him, head on his chest; in the despair at seven p.m., when he would hold me and rub my belly for an hour; in the despair again at nine p.m. when we would go for a night ride, down to the Royal Cliffs Diner in Englewood Cliffs where I would buy a cup of coffee with precisely seven sugars and a lot of cream. We were friends, soul mates and lovers.

I was seven. He was fifty-one.

Fragoso could have been one of the best American writers if she had lived longer. Yes, this novel is not perfect: you can notice it is a first novel, with some overlong descriptions and a few meandering chapters and characters that go nowhere. At the same time, it is one of those books that stay with you for weeks and months, while changing your entire worldview. I don’t think I will ever be able to think of love, attachment, addictions or mental illnesses the same way after I read this book. At least for me, that’s exactly the biggest thing a writer can achieve and it is the reason why I would rate this book higher that so many other American novels that are “perfectly” written in a Pulitzer-prize-winning way, but they can be forgotten minutes after you finish reading them.

I read this memoir last summer and find that it’s still haunting many months later. As other reviewers have already given a synopsis of the story, I will not repeat it here. I will add that Fragoso writes her story with visceral, unabashed and unexpected honesty; an honesty which this reader found very refreshing. If you are open to understand the inside of a pedophile relationship – not what you think it must be, or what you have been told it is, or even what you should take away from it – then give this book a try. This portrayal is not, I assure you, the stereotypic image of pedophilia. I also must add that there is no clear resolution or any particular moral to be learned from this memoir. I think this is what makes it so real. We get to experience a hellish and fascinating journey with the author as she finds her own way in her own time. An engaging, leisurely, summer time read.

I bought this because I used to work at a homeless shelter and met victims of abuse and never really understood what they might be dealing with. I found the book tough going. Not because it’s poorly written but because I found it hard to deal with both the descriptions of the abuse and the fact that it went on for years and nothing was done to stop it. I hope some good came from her writing it.

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