8

There are lots of people who might argue for a moratorium on memoirs by achingly sensitive writers looking to get on Oprah to tout books about the sorrows of their childhoods. And no single subject of those memoirs—pumped out by the hundreds over the last decade—seems more ready for retirement than memoirs devoted to retellings of traumatic childhood molestations. Celebs have written them, and ordinary folk, too. Ad nauseum. Amy Fusselman’s memoir, 8, might fit that description in some people’s minds, except for one important difference: She can write prose that would be worth reading no matter what subject matter she chose. And, in the case of her memoir about dealing with the terrible thing that happened to her when she was 4 years old, we have a writer whose gifts are equal to the seriousness of her tale. The book is a mere 132 pages that play out like a thread off a spool rolling across linoleum. A reviewer in Publisher’s Weekly said “there’s less here than meets the eye.” That reviewer could not be more mistaken.