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Jasmin Chua's Book List Lenore Terr, M.D., Unchained Memories: The True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found Terr artfully weaves together narratives revolving around the recovery of memories of traumatic childhood events. The opening account deals with Eileen Lipsker, who suddenly and vividly recalled seeing her father kill her childhood playmate 20 years earlier. In two other stories, Terr was a witness for the defense, explaining the concept of psychological amnesia to one jury and false memories to another. In the first, the defendant had suffered episodes of amnesia since seeing her mother burn to death, while in the second, a young girl had falsely accused her doctors of sexual abuse. Child abuse figures in two other stories--one involving a man whose repressed memories of his mother sexually abusing him and attempting to drown him returned with terrifying force, another about a former Miss America overwhelmed by the return of memories of incest. Shorter accounts describe how James Ellroy, author of Black Dahlia and other violent crime novels, had displaced memories of his own mother's brutal slaying, and how a radio talk-show host succeeded in recalling memories of a long-dead brother. Her non-fiction narrative style, strongly reminiscent of Truman Capote, makes the complicated subject readily digestible and a gripping read that is hard to put down. She starts off with the story, leaving the reader hanging in suspense, before delving into the more scientific aspects of memory repression. Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? In an amazing work of journalism, Sheehan chronicles the story of "Sylvia Frumkin," a highly intelligent young woman who become a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. Sheehan followed "Sylvia" for almost a year talking with and observing her, listening to her monologues, sitting in on medical consultations, and even for a period slept in the bed next to her in a mental hospital. "Tenacious, observant, and unsentimental," said Newsweek in a review of her work. Her lack of emotion, however, made the story almost clinical and the aura of detachment it presented made it difficult to plough through the heavy prose. |
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