MEMOIR: DARK ORDEAL
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard
The vast majority of 11-year- olds who walk to the school bus stop on a crisp morning in a quiet town, especially a tiny one like mine, will not be kidnapped. They will not be turned into sex slaves, tortured in a backyard shed, repeatedly raped and impregnated by a drug addict who says his evil deeds are the bidding of the angels whispering in his head.
In her book, “A Stolen Life,” (Simon & Schuster) Jaycee Dugard gives us all the fetid horror that authors like Dean Koontz and James Patterson have been trying to conjure on their pages for years. Only this time, it’s real. And it’s worse than fiction.
It’s a tough read. But work through it, and you’ll find more than the stomach-churning details that make you put it down the first night. This little memoir, which shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list the day before it was released, was written plainly and simply by Dugard herself, without the help of a ghostwriter. And in that, it is powerful beyond its voyeurism.
Dugard starts the book with her life in my hometown, South Lake Tahoe, Calif., where her family relocated after their apartment in Anaheim, home of Disneyland, was burgled. I walked to the bus stop throughout my childhood. I was always afraid, like Dugard was, of missing the bus and having to ask my dad — asleep after pulling a night shift in the nearby casinos — for a ride to school. I was lucky. I made it to school just about every day and was away at college on June 10, 1991.
On that morning, my little brother did his usual trek to a bus stop just a few miles from the spot where Dugard was doing the same thing. It was the last time my brother walked alone as a kid.
A car pulled up alongside Dugard, the window rolled down, and the driver began asking for directions. This happened all the time in Tahoe, where we would delight in sending tourists on a 70-mile trip around the lake to get to the casinos that were just 2 miles away in the opposite direction.
But the driver, Phillip Garrido, didn’t want the casinos. He and his wife, Nancy, wanted the 11-year-old blond in a pink windbreaker. He zapped her with a stun gun and dragged her into his car. She was his captive for 18 years.
Of course, the big question is: Why didn’t she ever run?
Reading the experience in her own words is a revelation. It allows us to understand who she was before she was snatched and how Garrido controlled her. Dugard gave birth to her first daughter when she was 14, then another when she was 17. Having those babies gave her company, love and a reason to run. And a reason not to run. Even when she made supervised forays to the beach, the store or the park, or searched online for lesson plans to home-school her girls, Dugard was afraid to utter her name. “I know my daughters don’t understand why I didn’t stand up for myself. It frustrates them, I know,” she writes. “That is something I am working on in therapy. My assertiveness.”
Garrido was a convicted sex offender who did time for raping a young woman in a storage shed in Reno after kidnapping her from a Tahoe casino parking lot in 1976, the same one I walked through alone countless times after a shift as a teenage waitress. Parole officers visited his house at least 60 times, according to a special report by the California Office of the Inspector General. They never went out back and looked into the window of the tiny shed to see her in handcuffs cuddling her stuffed animal Nurple Bear or hitting puberty or giving birth or teaching the two other souls who had arrived since the last few government visits.
When she was finally discovered in 2009, all it took was a couple of Berkeley police officers who finally acted on that gut feeling that something was not right, and pushed it a little further. Recognizing its failure to properly monitor a paroled sex offender, the state of California paid Dugard $20 million for her stolen life.
Dugard surprises, in the end, by her lack of bitterness. “Sometimes I look at my life and what I have and think I don’t deserve it,” she writes. “Look at all I have when there are so many struggling just to get by and feed their families.”
Assertiveness, Jaycee. You deserve all of it. And then some.
