Ask the Author: Debora Harding
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Debora Harding
I began writing the book several years after the catastrophic loss of my fourteen-year-old son Kadian in a sudden bicycle accident. You might say it became imperative to my survival, that I separate the existential questions left from the trauma of my childhood -- from the task of learning to cope with the sudden tragedy of having lost my gorgeous son. I barely survived being murdered at the age of fourteen. On top of my grief at Kadian being suddenly taken from us, the paradox of losing him at the same age seemed cruel.
When I started writing again -- my brain, my emotional compass, none of it worked the way it once did. I literally had to learn how to put sentences together again. In addition, I had spent two years in heavy grief and was re-emerging into the world at a time where the political landscape was rapidly changing, when a network of social safety, which had been established in a progressive political era where decency and care and concern for your fellow citizen was a kind of presumed starting point, was being destroyed. It felt familiar, like the dysfunctional and threatening environment I had grown up in. Donald Trump and my mother are very similar in personality. And watching the dismissal of assaults on women as irrelevant, was mortifying.
I returned to thinking about the issues of mental illness and violence that complicated the long-term aftermath of the crime. This wasn’t my first attempt at writing about it. But it was the first time it felt important to look at the forces that came into play with a wider lens. I had to get to a place of total irreverence for my past pain to find my true voice and what I felt to be a storytelling structure that could encompass the social and political conflicts that played themselves out, not only in my journey but in my parents journey, and that of my attacker Mr K (Mr K for kidnapper). The question of what enables a person to inflict devastating acts of violence on others seems as pertinent as ever. And the devastating increase of domestic violence cases we’ve seen in the Coronavirus lock down, only make it more urgent.
When I started writing again -- my brain, my emotional compass, none of it worked the way it once did. I literally had to learn how to put sentences together again. In addition, I had spent two years in heavy grief and was re-emerging into the world at a time where the political landscape was rapidly changing, when a network of social safety, which had been established in a progressive political era where decency and care and concern for your fellow citizen was a kind of presumed starting point, was being destroyed. It felt familiar, like the dysfunctional and threatening environment I had grown up in. Donald Trump and my mother are very similar in personality. And watching the dismissal of assaults on women as irrelevant, was mortifying.
I returned to thinking about the issues of mental illness and violence that complicated the long-term aftermath of the crime. This wasn’t my first attempt at writing about it. But it was the first time it felt important to look at the forces that came into play with a wider lens. I had to get to a place of total irreverence for my past pain to find my true voice and what I felt to be a storytelling structure that could encompass the social and political conflicts that played themselves out, not only in my journey but in my parents journey, and that of my attacker Mr K (Mr K for kidnapper). The question of what enables a person to inflict devastating acts of violence on others seems as pertinent as ever. And the devastating increase of domestic violence cases we’ve seen in the Coronavirus lock down, only make it more urgent.
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