Half the House

The headlines that followed the hardcover publication of this unflinching memoir testify to its power: "Poet's memoirs lead to arrest of alleged child molester," "Author's writing on abuse brings new victims forward." In a new afterword, Richard Hoffman writes about the events his book set in motion, the cries for help he received from men across the country, and the talk he had with an eleven-year-old boy who thanked him "for making it stop." Against the backdrop of postwar, blue-collar America, Half the House depicts a family's struggles to care for two terminally ill children, recounts the sexual abuse to which the author, at age ten, was subjected by his coach, and explores the ways in which grief and rage estrange those who need each other most. A testament to the healing power of truth telling, this "spare, poignang" memoir (Time) "offers heartening evidence, to borrow William Faulkner's phrase, of the human capacity to endure and prevail" (Washington Post).