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Dancing with the Octopus
- A Memoir of a Crime
- Narrated by: Debora Harding
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Bloomsbury presents Dancing with the Octopus by Debora Harding, read by Debora Harding.
For listeners of Educated and The Glass Castle, a harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring memoir of childhood trauma and its long reach into adulthood.
One Omaha winter day in November 1978, when Debora Harding was just 14, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom and then left to die as an ice storm descended over the city.
Debora survived. She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move on. Denial became the family coping strategy offered by her fun-loving, conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother.
It wasn’t until decades later - when beset by the symptoms of PTSD - that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and re-imagine his complex story. This was a quest for the truth that would threaten the lie at the heart of her family and with it the sacred bond that once saved her.
Dexterously shifting between the past and present, Debora Harding untangles the incident of her kidnapping and escape from unexpected angles, offering a vivid, intimate portrait of one family’s disintegration in the 1970s Midwest.
Written with dark humor and the pacing of a thriller, Dancing with the Octopus is a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking narrative of reckoning, recovery and the inexhaustible strength it takes to survive.
What the critics say
"This moving story of grit and resilience will resonate with readers long after the final page is turned." (Publishers Weekly)
"A gripping memoir, Dancing With the Octopus is both a heartbreaking reconstruction of a crime and a powerful account of healing from trauma." (Electric Lit, Most Anticipated Debuts of the Second Half of 2020)
"Dancing with the Octopus is a brave and authentic picture of the tailwinds of trauma, the limits of human forgiveness and what it takes to maintain hope in a world bent on breaking us. Highly readable, and deeply moving." (Rachel Louise Snyder, award-winning author of No Visible Bruises)