From the time she was four until she was 18, Sue William Silverman was sexually abused by her father. She didn't grow up in a trailer park or on the wrong side of the tracks. Her father was a government official and banker. Their lifestyle was affluent.

   Her father's incest was never reported or punished, her mother was complicit in it, and her sister knew about it. This story is shocking yet commonplace, and the author, like every other abused child, struggled to make sense of it.

   She knew the relationship was strange, and she knew the girls in novels she read didn't do this with their daddies. She also knew never to tell anyone about it, and like every sexual abused child, part of her checked out.

   Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You reads like a novel. Highly recommended as a first-person account of incest.

From Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You:

--(About her parents’ marriage)  "He never left her; she never left him. So I must know they wanted to remain married all these years, almost sixty.  Daddy, for me?  Did he stay with her in order to stay with me?  Or did he stay with her because she was his wife?  She was his wife, the one to whom he wrote beautiful anniversary letters.  Who was I, then?  Certainly I wasn't his daughter; certainly I wasn't his wife.  A mistress?  A lover?  A slut?  Yes, my mother always called me that.  She received the tribute, the money, the title of wife while she allowed me to perform unspeakable acts with her husband; acts she didn't want to perform herself.  Her love: I was a present to her husband.  His: how gratefully he accepted me.  They chose to be dangerous parents.  It is a choice: to choose to protect children or not.  Right now I'm angry she's dead, angry because right now I want to kill her."

--"In the restaurant on the top floor of the retirement complex, my parents' friends meet me.  They exclaim about my wonderful parents.  I smile and agree.  My father gives lectures wowing people with the breadth of his knowledge.  After one of his lectures a letter to the editor appears in the local newspaper with the headline 'Positively Electrifying.'  The letter ends by saying, 'Dr. Silverman, those who know you must surely love you!'  …Even if I told the people in the restaurant the truth about my parents, they would not hear me.  The truth would be too difficult to consider."