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A novelist and poet narrates intertwined stories of the abuse he and his mother suffered at the hands of two different men.

Nicorvo was 7 when an unknown assailant assaulted his struggling single mother, Sharon. Rather than tell her children that the man who raped her also threatened to kill her, Sharon lied and said she had been mugged. At the same time, writes the author, he was suffering sexual abuse by a deeply troubled older boy. At the time, Nicorvo was unable to comprehend what had happened, and he said nothing to his mother. “I’m attuned to her feelings,” he writes. “They tell me more about the world than her words. I can read her feelings like a picture book, but I have a harder time knowing their cause.” Still, the emotional damage that resulted from both events continued to haunt the author, and he even developed an unfounded yet crippling fear that he was “bound to become a child molester.” As an adult, he searched obsessively to learn the exact details of his mother’s rape and suffered a psychotic break from the immense psychological burdens he was forced to carry. Reflecting on these events, Nicorvo concludes that living without a stable father figure created the “early grave” that became his responsibility to “keep from falling” into and that the poverty that chased at Sharon’s heels only exacerbated the situation. “Less money,” he writes, “does make her more of a target….The cause, poverty, and the effect, abuse, are so intimately united in this country that they’re nearly the same damn thing.” Yet even as he movingly muses—sometimes compulsively, through stream-of-conscious-style writing—about his past and the shifting nature of memory, Nicorvo manages to find sanity and grace in a loving family of his own making.

A frank, dark, disturbing, deeply emotional roller-coaster ride.