Dancing with the Octopus: A Memoir of a Crime
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For readers of Educated and The Glass Castle, a harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring memoir of childhood trauma and its long reach into adulthood, named one of the Best True Crime Books by Marie Claire.
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.
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.
Bloomsbury Publishing: October 2021 | Paperback: 384 pages
About the Author
Debora Harding spent her childhood in the midwest prairie states of Nebraska and Iowa. At the age of nineteen she dropped out of university to work for Senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaign, before relocating to Washington D.C. to run an environmental non-profit. Fed up with politics, she cycled across America where she met her English husband, author Thomas Harding. She then joined him in the UK and worked at an award-winning video production company that focused on the counter-culture protest movement in Europe. Later, she co-founded the United Kingdom's first local television station in Oxford and gave birth to two children, Kadian and Sam. Wanting the children to enjoy the great outdoors, the family moved back to the United States, and Debora trained as a restorative justice mediator and ran an independent bicycle business. She is now a full-time writer and activist, and splits her time between the United Kingdom and the United States.
Reviews
“Bravely looks at her family trauma and the hope of restorative justice-combining wit, drama, and deep self-reflection to investigate the aftershocks of a devastating crime.” ―Oxygen, “The Best True Crime Books Of 2020 For Holiday Gifting”
“This moving story of grit and resilience will resonate with readers long after the final page is turned.” ―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“A gripping memoir, Dancing With the Octopus is both a heartbreaking reconstruction of a crime and a powerful account of healing from trauma.” ―Electric Lit, Most Anticipated Debuts of the Second Half of 2020
“Harding's writing is exquisite, often funny… This book is personal, deeply and bravely thoughtful, and creatively expressed. . . . it can serve as a tool for the politically engaged.” ―New York Journal of Books
“Darkly humorous . . . Harding draws a complex web of interlinked experiences to show how suffering can set up shop for good in a family and a town. Dancing With the Octopus joins a host of recent true crime memoirs dedicated to grounding crimes in a wider framework of social and familial contexts.” ―CrimeReads, “Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020”
