"A Stolen Life" by Jaycee Dugard

The early chapters of the book are dominated with the grammar, vocabulary, and repetition of a 5th grader. Children who are traumatically separated from their family will freeze developmentally as if all their energies go into survival. Lack of education and appropriate stimulation certainly contribute to developmental delays that Jaycee would have experienced in captivity. Until the birth of Jaycee's children she seems stuck, in a holding pattern, but surviving. Her good sense and quick wit in handling her captor’s capricious moods and bizarre delusions kept her alive.

It must have been difficult for her to decide how explicit she should be. She explains her decision to write to Diane Sawyer during an interview. She says she's "staring it down." Her honesty comes out of a deep understanding of her own innocence.

She describes the sexual abuse she endured in concise straight forward language. To leave out those facts would express shame which she has no reason to feel. It could allow the reader to fill in the blanks with less horrific imaginings, and diluted her story. This could even, coupled with her later quasi-family relationships, lead to a more sympathetic understanding of what happened. She describes just enough to let us know the scope of what she experienced, without describing more than necessary.

After the birth of her children she was allowed more freedom and began exhibiting some signs of Stockholm Syndrome. Her writing begins mature slightly, but is still riddled with repetition and errors that would keep an English teacher very busy making red marks. Compared to samples of email messages she wrote at this time these chapters are quite different. She corrects spelling and uses capitalization rules appropriately in the book, unlike the e-mail. The “errors” in these chapters are intentional. They help the reader experience her boredom and stalled development.

When she begins to describe her rescue and recovery her writing style rapidly emerges as mature, complex, and sophisticated. She could have written the whole memoir in this way, but chose not to for good reasons.

Jaycee reveals a love for storytelling and a rich imagination when she recounts the stories she made up to pass her time in isolation. I hope she finds the time to write fiction and can make a meaningful contribution to literature. She's given us a tremendous gift by sharing her memoir, but there is so much more to her than her horrific experiences.