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With unflinching honesty, these 18 authoritative voices challenge the reader to look deeply into the complexity of memory and child sexual abuse.

This is the most significant compilation of study to date about memory and false memory of child sexual abuse. Fragment by Fragment is both scholarly and clear and readable. The book’s authors assert, in different voices and perspectives, that memory is extremely complex. With intellectual integrity, these feminist scholars look squarely and deeply into this multi-layered phenomenon.

The book gives us a complex understanding of the innate ambiguity of memory, itself, especially memory of trauma. As the title suggests, it is by piling fragment after fragment that a survivor, a therapist, a court, or society at large can come to a clear assertion that sexual abuse or incest has occurred in any given case. One part of this ambiguity is the fractured psyche of the survivor. A victim may know that they were abused, may have always remembered it, can even have concrete substantiation that it occurred, and yet may still doubt it, at moments, or for periods of time, in order to protect herself from bottomless grief.

Remembering trauma is debilitating, sometimes impossible. We know and accept this for victims of other kinds of trauma, for example in war or after terrible car accidents, but yet society still holds the view that forgetting must be rare. Society has a profound need to deny the extent of both abuse and protective amnesia. This denial reinflicts the survivor. So, if she can manage to disbelieve or disregard her own experience she becomes more acceptable. The survivor’s silence in turn prevents society from learning more, so the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle.

The book also includes a section on the courts, specifically how the ‘false memory syndrome’ was created to discredit witnesses testimonies. FMS defense is now used regularly, in Canada and the US, even where the victim never forgot, or there is corroboration, or even physical evidence. The passage of time also calls such memory into question.

Therapist Anna Salter recounts how she was attacked for challenging the claims of false memory advocates; she endured lawsuits and slanderous comments in attempts to discredit her. While she encourages professionals to refuse to be intimidated by these tactics, the book points out that many therapists and legal professionals have stopped or reduced their work with survivors because of such attacks.

So here’s my recommendation. Buy this book and read it; then pass it on (or buy a second copy and give it away). Perhaps then the book will have achieved its purpose, as a tool for social and political change.

It’s up to us to get it out there.

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It took me two tries to get through this novel. That’s how effective Maureen Medved is at portraying the raw angst of teenage girlhood. Tracey speaks to the reader directly and she doesn’t mince words. Initially I couldn’t help but shrink from her foul language, her hysteria and seemingly desperate inventions. It seemed overdone, melodramatic–I kept my distance and judged her sanity.

But as Tracey’s story seeps around the edges of her wild anecdotes, I began to connect the dots, and to see the true picture: Tracey’s survival depends on her fantasies, because the reality of her life is too brutal for her conscious mind to accept directly. Neglected by narcissistic parents who nevertheless forbid her to leave the house for fear she’ll be murdered, tormented by classmates and even by the boy she adores from afar, Tracey has good reason to be desperate. Her mother’s one love is growing flowers, but her message for her daughter is "good seeds sprout - bad seeds pout." Tracey accepts her role as bad seed, and with adolescent literalism, objectifies herself into an "it."

As the novel opens, her beloved little brother Sonny has gone missing while in her care. She has left him alone when the boy she adores invited her into his car. For the duration of the book, Tracey persists in her fantasy relationship with "Billy Speed", while blaming herself for her little brother’s disappearance.

I recognized myself in Tracey’s intense need to act out, and shrank from those 20-year-old memories of coping alone, with no one to help. In an absurd scene, Tracey runs to her psychiatrist’s office in desperation, suggesting that she move in with her. Dr. Heker is incapable of responding with any depth. Her only answer is to tell Tracey to come back when she has an appointment, even as the girl is bouncing in her chair around the waiting room, pretending she’s in a straitjacket.

I wondered how many 15-year-old girls there are, so desperately needing just one understanding adult to take them seriously and listen to their pain, to reassure them that they are not crazy, they are not to blame? And how many teachers, counsellors, and neighbours can’t see past the swearing and acting out to the terrified child hidden inside?

The Tracey Fragments is unbearably ugly in its presentation of the life of a stereotypical "bad girl" who drinks, smokes, and brags about how much she likes fucking her boyfriend. Medved insists on exposing her readers to every raw detail. That’s why she has succeeded in forcing us to feel what it really feels like to be Tracey. And Tracey is real. She is a hundred abused teenage girls, 20 years ago, today, tomorrow. Perhaps if adults remember that reality, the Traceys of tomorrow will get the help they need.