Buried Lives Memoir of a Survivor by Nancy Dillingham $3.99 Available for your Kindle!

Visit: Nancy Dillingham Amazon Author's Page

Framing her tale as a "fictional memoir," Nancy Dillingham takes on a topic historically avoided by the psychiatric community—sexual abuse of a client by a therapist.

In the Kindle Store


Other Works by Nancy Dillingham

To order one of the titles below: send check or money order to:

Nancy Dillingham
48 Saint Dunstan’s Road
Asheville, NC 28803

 

New Ground: Poems and Stories $9.95, Hardback $21.95 Foreword by Fred Chappell

The Ambiguity of Morning: Poems and Stories $9.95

First Light: Poems $12.00

Thanks for the Dark but That's Not Home: Poems and Stories $15.00

Colloquy in Black and White: Poems $10.00

Home: Poems $9.00

Reflections in a River Photographs by Joan Medlicott, Haiku by Nancy Dillingham $19.95

Americana Rural: Poems and Stories $9.00

1950: Poems (chapbook) $12.49

Horizons: Poems  $10.00



 

About the Book
About the Author

Works by Nancy Dillingham (Continued)

Anthologies with coeditor Celia Miles

Order the below at www.CeliaMiles.com

Christmas Presence from 45 WNC Women Writers $18.00

Clothes Lines from 75 WNC Women Writers $20.00

Women's Spaces Women's places from 50 WNC Women Writers  $20.00

It's All Relative:  Tales from the Tree from 50 WNC Women Writers $16.95

 

About the book

Framing her tale as a "fictional memoir," Nancy Dillingham takes on a topic historically avoided by the psychiatric community—sexual abuse of a client by a therapist.

This novella reads like a detective thriller where the protagonist and her tormentor play a suspenseful cat and mouse game of wits that ultimately lays bare the buried lives of each. The story builds to an excruciatingly painful and heartbreaking climax where the protagonist victoriously fights for her life and her sanity, all the while exposing her tormentor behind the mask, masquerading as a therapist.

Juxtaposing poetic and brutal passages, Dillingham’s work offers incisive and damning commentary on a too-long-hidden problem insidiously woven into the fabric of our society.

Excerpts:

“The disillusionment I experienced, necessary though it was, and too long coming, also brought me grief. I was only beginning to realize the implication of my neediness. I had settled for an abusive form of contact rather than no contact at all. I was ashamed of myself. He had methodically sabotaged my self-trust. He had disabled my sense of direction and my judgment. I had lost any chance of resolving the problems I had brought to him initially. I had lost the opportunity to deal with the additional conflicts that emerged in the course of therapy and I had lost a father.”

~

“Within a mere two months the combined effects of the sexual abuse and the unresolved problems that had originally prompted me to enter psychotherapy, made life unbearable. I was burdened with an unending depression, and my thoughts progressed from occasional ideas about suicide to a studied contemplation of it. I had experienced a pervasive sense of having no control over my life. I felt helpless to affect the world around me, to affect my inner world. I was torn between caring for the once trusted Dr. X and hating the therapist who had used me sexually. My confusion emerged in the form of violent dreams that brought me screaming into wakefulness.”
 


About the Author

Nancy Dillingham is a sixth-generation Dillingham from Big Ivy in western North Carolina. She is the author of nine books of poetry and short fiction and co-editor, with Celia Miles, of four anthologies of WNC women writers. Her volume of poems Home was nominated for a SIBA. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.


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