Author of the week: Jaycee Dugard

last updated 8 January 2015

Stories don’t come any more heart-wrenching than Jaycee Dugard’s, said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. Most everyone by now knows at least some of the details about the 18 years Dugard spent in captivity after her abduction at age 11 by convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido. Still, it’s no surprise that Dugard’s own version of her story, told in her memoir—A Stolen Life—has become a runaway hit, selling nearly 100,000 e-book editions in just one day. The book shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list primarily on the strength of an interview Dugard sat for with ABC’s Diane Sawyer; she appeared remarkably composed for someone who was sexually abused and who was held against her will for most of her life. Her book reinforces that impression. “I don’t believe in hate,” she writes about her feelings toward Garrido. “To hate wastes too much time.”

For parents especially, Dugard’s book can be a tough read, said Tina Jordan in Entertainment Weekly. “I hear the lock rattle and know he is coming to feed me.…The handcuffs are making my wrists raw and make it hard to use my hands,” she writes of her early imprisonment. The graphic descriptions of the rapes she endured and the terror of giving birth at 14 to her captor’s child take readers through a spectrum of emotions. Yet the experience is tempered by the foreknowledge of how the story ends. Garrido may have stolen much of Dugard’s life, but as she so courageously says, “He didn’t get all of me.”