Lolita, only real: In artful debut, Fragoso chillingly details a childhood of abuse

By Alice Gregory  Globe Correspondent / March 6, 2011 
The molestation memoir is a much treaded upon genre, a favorite of Oprah and teen readers primed on V.C. Andrews. It’s a genre whose sharpness is wilted by all of its fictionalized versions, with despicable storylines and inevitable grotesqueries that put it always at risk of melodrama. Good literature so often relies on moral ambiguity, and the sexual violation of children is hardly a topic that inspires equivocating sympathy. But “Tiger, Tiger,’’ the debut memoir by Margaux Fragoso, is saved from schmaltz. It reads like a revised “Lolita,’’ told from the point of view of Dolores Haze rather than Humbert Humbert — a Dolores who chooses a PhD over a trailer park pregnancy. In “Tiger, Tiger,’’ Fragoso has given us the definitive portrait of both ruined innocence and misplaced empathy. The book is so powerful because it’s a work of verified truth, authored by the victim under her own name. Fragoso forces us to confront the dark world that exists just barely behind the bright one.

 www.boston.com/.../in_artful_debut_fragoso_chillingly_details_childhood_ of_abuse/

2. Tiger, Tiger March 7, 2011   Margaux Fragoso met Peter Curran when she was 7 and he was 51. For the next 15 years until his suicide, they had a hidden, violent and sexually abusive relationship. Her new memoir, Tiger, Tiger is being likened to a "reverse, true-life Lolita," told from the perspective of Delores Haze's character, which in some ways humanizes the pedophile who preyed upon her without excusing him.
The Globe and Mail has a review with an accompanying author interview: Deconstructing the Monster.
Additional Reviews:
* The National Post
* New York Observer
* Buffalo News
From the Times article:
So who — other than voyeurs looking for a sustained close-up of a pedophile in action — will want to read this book? To bear witness to a numbingly long series of violations of a child by a man who has honed his wickedness for decades is not more pleasant than it sounds. As a society we energetically oppose sexual abuse; as individuals most of us shy away from investigating a relationship characterized by creepy kisses and inappropriate fondling. Worse, we defend cowardice by calling it discretion — minding our own business. Maybe a book like “Tiger, Tiger” can help us be a little braver. Certainly, it took courage to write.
The real cost of a broken taboo is that the revulsion it awakens allows predators freedom to claim one victim after another: because we glance away from crimes — abominations — prevented only by vigilance, the most disheartening aspect of this story is sickeningly familiar. Years before meeting Fragoso, Curran forged papers to marry a 15-year-old; he “hurt” his daughters from a second marriage by “being sexual with” them; during the two years Fragoso’s parents were sufficiently responsible to keep their daughter separated from him, Curran was accused of molesting one of the children he fostered for the state of New Jersey. “Tiger, Tiger” offers us yet another opportunity to open our eyes and redeem ourselves.
www.metafilter.com/101283/Tiger-Tiger