Eating the Elephant by Alice Wells is a hard book to read because it deals with issues of child sexual abuse. I picked this book up in The Hedgehog Bookshop in Penrith (see their website here). Every time I am in the area I visit this independent bookshop because they have an interesting collection of new books for sale and they often have titles I have never seen anywhere else, including books local to the area.
This book is the true story of a family. The author, Alice, is British but married an American man, who worked with computers, and went to live with him in the USA and practised as a doctor. They had two children, a girl and then a boy, and lived a full life. One afternoon Alice returned home, having been unable to contact her husband Mark during the day, to find that the police had visited her home, with a warrant, and seized all of her husband’s electronic equipment. The paperwork she found indicated that they were searching for indecent images of children. Shocked by this discovery she tried to contact Mark but found out that he had been killed in a head-on collision with another vehicle.
After the death of her husband Alice discovered that he had a substantial collection of images of child abuse, and that he had gone heavily into debt to purchase these and to join groups of other people who shared similar tastes. This was a complete shock to Alice who had not realised what her husband had been doing with his computer equipment. She found herself having to deal with large debts, start functioning as a single mother, and facing the suspicions of her neighbours and friends who did not believe in her innocence. Worse was to follow when she realised that her four-year-old daughter, Grace, had been sexually abused by her husband, and possibly by others.
The author describes the situation as an elephant. It occupies all her space and the whole of her mind and often threatens to crush her. Her only solution is to understand what has happened and to come to terms with it – she calls this eating the elephant. The book certainly makes you think about how you would react if someone close to you was discovered to have a secret life of abuse. It is impossible not to sympathise with the author, although she still finds much in her husband to admire and love despite what he did. It is frustrating for Alice, and the reader, not to know if his death was suicide and what other activities he had engaged in which have not yet come to light.
I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed this book – who could ? I did think, however, that it was a useful and interesting read. I have a number of biographies of people suffering abusive childhoods, and will keep this book with those.
Anne Is Reading 