When The Piano Stops Book Review — By Fawziyya Zakariyya
A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse
I've heard people describe their lives in form of a low humming song. It goes smoothly, according to harmony. Some minor disturbances maybe, but it still was a good song. When The Piano Stops is a memoir written by Catherine McCall who in the later stages of her life recalled a set of traumatic events that happened in her past. She had completely repressed the memories of her father’s sexual abuse and had only began to remember them when she sought therapeutic help. Does the title of her book suggest that her life too was a low humming song until she remembered? I don’t know because even before she remembered these traumatic events, she very well knew how her mother’s alcoholism and her father’s psychological abuse affected her and her sibling’s childhood.
Catherine McCall ended her preface with the words, “Make some good of it. Please.” I think she was preparing us for an emotional story, one that would be easily classified as something you don’t want to make sense of. She introduced us to her parents when she was twenty-five in 1973. She then took us back to when she was six, then to when the sexual abuse started at eight, and the final rape at Eighteen. The writer writes her story in past participle and it’s kind of hard to decipher. Although once you get used to it, you sink into the story.
This is one of the most emotional, heart wrenching book I've read. It describes not only the author’s pain of dealing with an alcoholic mother and abusive father but also how she navigated her relationship with Peter McCall, her husband. It shook the readers because the things that happen are hard to imagine. She had to undergo years and years in therapy, even becoming a certified marriage and family therapist herself. Although she used hypnosis and I’m not sure I agree with it, but it helped her retrieve her memories of years of sexual abuse and abortions, and one incident of her father’s sexual abuse on her brother. Personally, I don’t think forgiveness is possible, but Catherine McCall forgave her father who still denied his sexual abuse history with her. I like how she critiqued the Catholic church and found her way to a new church that suited her beliefs. She also touched her siblings’ personal life and even talked about she and her husband’s sex life, their marital struggles, and her children. I felt that without this, the book would have been Incomplete.
The author acknowledges that the healing process is a long way and she might still be on her way to ‘the healed’ land. I think this book is a really good book for a sexual abuse memoir.
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