Description
“Alice Tallmadge entwines memoir and literary journalism in this heart-rending account of her bright, talented, and deeply troubled niece, whose downward spiral in the 1980s was abetted by mass hysteria over so-called satanic ritual abuse of children. Tallmadge takes to task the shockingly credulous (or self-serving) doctors, therapists, academics, and popular authors who perpetuated that unfounded craze, and casts the same unsparing eye on herself as she struggles with grief and guilt and wins through, in the beautiful final pages, to a new, hard-earned dimension of being.”
—John Daniel, author of Gifted and Rogue River Journal, 2011 Oregon Book Award recipient for literary nonfiction
“In Now I Can See the Moon, Alice Tallmadge tells the story of a beloved niece lost to suicide. She weaves together strands of family love, false memories, mental illness, faith, and our inability to speak in a haunting story about what we need to be whole and what we are willing to give those we love.”
—Sallie Tisdale, author of Violation: Collected Essays, Women of the Way: Discovering 2500 years of Buddhist Wisdom, and The Best Thing I Ever tasted: The Secret of Food
“Now I Can See the Moon is the first thoughtful account of a family caught in the vise of the ritual abuse panic that swept the country in the 1980s and early 1990s. Tallmadge takes us through a long, slow wringer of doom. It’s the private doom of caring deeply for someone who’s gravely mentally ill and wanting to help, yet suspecting that the accepted method of ‘help’ is making things much worse. It’s the civic doom of slowly, painstakingly realizing that a country-wide hysteria engulfed one’s own family—negating good sense, love, and even life itself. For every friend, family member and mental health professional who was sucked into the panic, Tallmadge’s quiet, beautifully written memoir will be painful but necessary reading.”
—Debbie Nathan, coauthor of Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt and author of Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case
“Alice Tallmadge’s magnificent memoir is a story told with the intimacy of a family member, and the breathtakingly beautiful writing of a terrific journalist. It’s a story of false memories that has afflicted so many families in the last half century. I commend Now I Can See the Moon for understanding the problem, and communicating it so superbly.”
—Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine; Past President, Association for Psychological Science; Author, Eyewitness Testimony
