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October 25, 2006

A Harrowing Trauma -- And the Attempt to Master It

In 1977, Terri Jentz and a girl friend, then college students at Yale, started on a bicycle trip from the west to the east coast. Camping overnight in Oregon, they were attacked while sleeping by a man clad in cowboy type clothes who drove his truck over their tent and severely wounded them with a hatchet.

They were found by a teenage couple who saved their lives by getting them to a rural hospital where they received remarkably good treatment. The crime was never solved. For the next 15 years, Terri seemed to recover and she became a successful screen writer.

However she was aware that she was still estranged from a part of herself as a consequence of her trauma. In 1992 she returned to the scene of the crime in an effort to face her demons and find out who was her attacker. The police had done almost nothing to solve the crime, and she set out to interview everyone in the area who might have knowledge about the perpetrator.

She is very persistent, and she finally discovers who almost certainly was the guilty man. Knowing this seems to be helpful to her, but this is not clear. What is clear is that she discovers the local tolerance for male abuse of females, especially among the women who were his lovers. Jentz tells her story in a compelling way in her book, A Strange Piece of Paradise.

Posted by admin at October 25, 2006 04:48 PM