Book review: Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso

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      Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir
      By Margaux Fragoso. Douglas & McIntyre, 336 pp, hardcover

      Ten years have passed since 66-year-old Peter Curran jumped off a cliff in Palisades Park outside of Union City, New Jersey, ending his life and a 15-year relationship with Margaux Fragoso, then 22. He left her 10 suicide letters, the key to his car, and the fallout of a pedophilic relationship that started when Margaux was seven.

      In the years following Curran’s death, Fragoso earned a PhD in English and creative writing and has published her work in literary journals. She also married and is now raising a daughter. Her first book, Tiger, Tiger, is a memoir of the relationship that defined her childhood and adolescence.

      The terrible beauty in Fragoso’s writing gets under your skin. She is exacting in fleshing out the nuances of her hidden-in-plain-sight relationship. Sexual exploits are confusingly mired in Peter’s friendship and youthful pastimes like animal role-playing games, Super Mario 3, and singing along to Nirvana’s In Utero. “If I ever thought for one moment you weren’t enjoying things as much as I was, I would stop everything sexual,” he tells 12-year-old Margaux. “I mean that.”

      The book refreshingly steers clear of simplistic good-and-evil devices and “innocence lost” clichés. Instead, Fragoso offers a revelatory, clear-eyed exploration of the complex mechanisms of power, denial, desperation, and secrecy that make emotional, sexual, and physical violence possible. The discussion of abuse is elevated by Fragoso’s remarkable empathy for her abusers.

      We discover that Margaux’s mother and Peter were both sexually abused as children. Margaux’s alcoholic father expresses his own feelings of confinement and failure with violence. His constant rage drives Margaux and her mother away from the family home and closer to Peter, whose affection offers welcome respite to them both. Margaux never uses child molester or pedophile to describe Peter when he’s alive. As the only person in her life who shows her kindness, he matters too much for her to put him in danger, even though he doesn’t reciprocate the consideration.

      Fragoso is pitiless in her account of the twisted codependence she shared. Using material culled from diaries and daily letters exchanged with Peter, she describes certain scenes in such unflinching detail that some may interpret them as child pornography. But if secrets and lies make abusers successful, Tiger, Tiger takes power away from them by articulating the unspeakable, encouraging readers to break their own silence.

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