fragmenting a personality, but there is nothing difficult to
understand. The child becomes many children, and each has a
personality and work cut out for it; each personality helps the
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Memory
child endure. What is difficult is how children are hurt, and
sometimes the denial of multiple personalities, which is, of
course, a denial of memory, is also a denial of sexual abuse.
The story isn’t simple enough to be believed by outsiders, but
the victim has found a way to survive. It’s miraculous, real y.
One ritual-abuse survivor with double-digit personalities told
me to think of her as a small army fighting for the rights of
women. I do.
A memoir, which this is, says: this is what my memory
insists on; this is what my memory will not let go; these
points of memory make me who I am, and al that others find
incomprehensible about me is explained by what’s in here.
I need to say that I don’t care about being understood; I want
my work to exist on its merits and not on the power of personality or celebrity. I have done this book because a lot of people asked me to, and I hope this work can serve as a kind
of bridge over which some girls and women can pass into
their own feminist work, perhaps more ambitious than mine
but never less ambitious, because that is too easy. I want
women to stop crimes against women. There I stand or fal .
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Acknowledgments
This book owes everything to Elaine Markson. She wanted
me to write it and helped me at every step along the way.
I also want to thank Nikki Craft, Sal y Owen, Eva Dworkin,
Michael Moorcock, Linda Moorcock, Robin Morgan, John
Stoltenberg, Susan Hunter, Jane Manning, Sheri DiPelesi,
Louise Armstrong, Julie Bindell, Gail Abarbanel, Valerie
Harper, and Gretchen Langheld for their support.
I am grateful to David Evans, producer for the BBC1 series
Omnibus. I used testimony from the documentary done on my
work by David; he helped make the last third of this book
possible.
I am also grateful to my editor, Elizabeth Maguire, for her
useful suggestions and great enthusiasm. I thank her assistant,
William Morrison, and al the other folks at Basic Books for
their work in publishing Heartbreak.
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