Now I Can See The Moon

A Story of a Social Panic, False Memories, and a Life Cut Short

by Alice Tallmadge

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Pub Date Apr 24 2018 | Archive Date Apr 17 2018

She Writes Press

Biographies & Memoirs | Nonfiction (Adult)

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Description

In the 1980s and 1990s, a mind-boggling social panic over child sex abuse swept through the country, landing childcare workers in prison and leading hundreds of women to begin recalling episodes of satanic ritual abuse and childhood abuse by family members. Now I Can See the Moon: A Story of a Social Panic, False Memories, and a Life Cut Short is a deeply personal account of the devastating impact the panic had on one family. In trying to understand the suicide of her twenty-three-year-old niece, a victim of the panic, the author discovers that what she thought was an isolated tragedy was, in fact, part of a much larger social phenomenon that sucked in individuals from all walks of life, convincing them to believe the unbelievable and embrace the most aberrant claims as truth.

Advance Praise

“This wrenching story illuminates the dark days of ‘recovered memory,’ issuing a warning that’s all too relevant to ‘fake news’ in America today.”

—Meredith Maran, author of My Lie: A True Story of Recovered Memory and The New Old Me

“Alice Tallmadge entwines memoir and literary journalism in this heart-rending account of her bright, talented, and deeply troubled niece, whose downward spiral in the 1980s was abetted by mass hysteria over so-called satanic ritual abuse of children. Tallmadge takes to task the shockingly credulous (or self-serving) doctors, therapists, academics, and popular authors who perpetuated that unfounded craze, and casts the same unsparing eye on herself as she struggles with grief and guilt and wins through, in the beautiful final pages, to a new, hard-earned dimension of being.”

—John Daniel, author of Gifted and Rogue River Journal, 2011 Oregon Book Award recipient for literary nonfiction

“In Now I Can See the Moon, Alice Tallmadge tells the story of a beloved niece lost to suicide. She weaves together strands of family love, false memories, mental illness, faith, and our inability to speak in a haunting story about what we need to be whole and what we are willing to give those we love.”

—Sallie Tisdale, author of Violation: Collected Essays

“Now I Can See the Moon is the first thoughtful account of a family caught in the vise of the ritual abuse panic that swept the country in the 1980s and early 1990s. Tallmadge takes us through a long, slow wringer of doom. It’s the private doom of caring deeply for someone who’s gravely mentally ill and wanting to help, yet suspecting that the accepted method of ‘help’ is making things much worse. It’s the civic doom of slowly, painstakingly realizing that a country-wide hysteria engulfed one’s own family―negating good sense, love, and even life itself. For every friend, family member and mental health professional who was sucked into the panic, Tallmadge’s quiet, beautifully written memoir will be painful but necessary reading.”

—Debbie Nathan, coauthor of Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt and author of Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case