Look Me in the Eye: Caryl's Story Review

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(More customer reviews)Victimhood is an objective state of being - but, undoubtedly, also a subjective state of mind. The author's tumultuous and tortured life led her to this epiphany which allowed her to embark on a process of self-empowerment and healing.
The book is not for the faint-hearted or the politically correct. It mercilessly explores in excruciating detail the fraught relationships between men and women, codependents and narcissists, society and victims, and therapists and "clients". The author holds nothing back: date rapes, addictions, domestic violence, incapacitating fears, warts and all. It is this candor that endears her to the reader. Early on in the book, we come to empathize with her and are rendered eager to join her in her voyage of self-discovery.
Rare in such confessionals, the author has never shut herself off from the big wide world out there. Her narrative is deliciously embedded in the story of her country, South Africa, its race relations, and the ancient wisdom possessed by its inhabitants. The book opens with a thinly-veiled metaphor: news about the tsunami in Thailand reverberate with the author's own quaking self and (third) marriage. Throughout this harrowing tome the world and its representatives intrude, at times helpful, mostly obstructive and mean.
Having defied incredible odds, the author emerges, in front of the readers' astonished gaze, as a beautiful, self-confident, mature, and self-aware woman. She shares the wealth of her experience by simply telling a story that is bound to captivate, infuriate, and educate. One of the best personal odyssey books I have ever read. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"


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'Love addiction is every bit as addictive as any narcotic; ask me, I have been there. I knew I couldn't stay in an unhappy, abusive and destructive marriage. I didn't just love my husband; I was obsessed with him. I believed that if I stayed and loved him enough, he would change - but I was wrong.'Caryl's story is a rare gift to our society as it provides an insight into an epidemic that brews behind closed doors in more homes than we would care to imagine. If statistics are accurate (the prevalence of abuse is much higher because domestic violence is notoriously under-reported), then a quarter of the female population in South Africa suffers abuse at home every week. In fact, 80% of violence that women suffer is at the hands of the men who supposedly love them. If we care at all for our humanity, society as a whole needs to take up Caryl's mantra of 'Abuse is No Excuse'.Few understand the nature or the power of abuse. We have never understood why someone would 'choose' to stay in an ongoing abusive relationship. However, in reading Caryl's story, she has enabled us to put ourselves in her place and are left to wonder if we would have been able to do it any differently given her history and her reality. This is the gift that Caryl brings us with her story and the honest way in which it is told - she makes it possible for us to move outside of ourselves and our own realities, judgments and prejudices so that we are able to walk the journey of another. This is a rare opportunity for us to truly 'live' the life of a victim of abuse and to understand - from a safe vantage point - the powerlessness, hopelessness and desperation.

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