La Honte

"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon." Shame begins as the story of a twelve-year-old girl, but it is also about the storyteller, a mature woman, the author herself. The violent moment lives inside her. The trauma comes at a moment when she is still so close to her mother and father that the threatened act of violence is incomprehensible. It cuts through her like an axe. Over time, the memory cools until it is just a snapshot she carries in her purse,…