02618cam a2200337 i 4500 1018145270 TxAuBib 20231025120000.0 200130s2020||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2020005048 9781635576122 hardback 1635576121 hardback (OCoLC)1138997770 TxAuBib rda Harding, Debora, author. Dancing with the octopus : a memoir of a crime / Debora Harding. New York, NY : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. 372 pages : illustration ; 25 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier sti rdacontent rdamedia rdacarrier "For readers of Educated and The Glass Castle, a harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring memoir of childhood trauma and its long reach into adulthood. One Omaha winter day in November 1978, when Debora Harding was just fourteen, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom, and then left to die as an ice storm descended over the city. Debora survived. She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move on. Denial became the family coping strategy offered by her fun-loving, conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother. It wasn't until decades later - when beset by the symptoms of PTSD- that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and reimagine his complex story. This was a quest for the truth that would threaten the lie at the heart of her family and with it the sacred bond that once saved her. Dexterously shifting between the past and present, Debora Harding untangles the incident of her kidnapping and escape from unexpected angles, offering a vivid, intimate portrait of one family's disintegration in the 1970s Midwest, a rusted landscape where the loss of white male power can flare into unspeakable violence. Written with dark humor and the pacing of a thriller, Dancing with the Octopus is a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking narrative of reckoning, recovery, and the inexhaustible strength it takes to survive"-- Provided by publisher. 20231025. Harding, Debora. Kidnapping victims Nebraska Biography. Abduction Nebraska. Autobiographies.