Comfort, Texas: Memoir

by Randa Jo Downs

Overview

Randa Jo Downs' childhood in Texas was a dichotomy of innocence and darkness. A haunting family secret lurked among her love for dancing, the escape of a vibrant imagination, and summer days spent swimming in rivers. While father-daughter incest is not an uncommon crime, it is one veiled in secrecy and shame.

Comfort, Texas is a poignant memoir that explores why Downs' father hurt his family beyond measure and why her mother did not protect her. It is a testament to the resilience of one spirit and the transformative power of using storytelling to understand and reclaim her childhood. Downs emerges not only as a survivor, but as a fierce lesbian feminist, theater artist, and child welfare advocate.

Downs dissects the crime of incest with a sharp blade. She examines a compelling body of work on the history of father-daughter incest in America and discovers a shocking betrayal of women and children going back generations. The psychoanalytic and legal professions depicted girls and women as unreliable narrators of their pain and trauma and only out to make trouble for their abusers. Downs joins the voices of second-wave feminism in challenging those cruel beliefs.

Her stories and essays will deeply resonate with other survivors and the people who care about them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798218378974
Publisher:	Llano River Press
Publication date:	10/10/2024
Pages:	244
Sales rank:	49,411
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

I am a writer, theater artist, and a voice for survivors of child sexual abuse. My memoir, Comfort, Texas, is a collection of essays and stories revealing my childhood in a southern good-girl culture that emphasized politeness and obedience. It was all deception to conceal life-changing sexual and emotional abuse. My memoir about father-daughter incest gives testament to the secrecy and shame that surrounded my entire childhood and young adult years. I was a walking contradiction between how I appeared on the outside and the fear and trauma held inside. “Pretty is as pretty does,” my grandmother told me.

It was in the writing of Comfort, Texas that I came to see my life as a whole experience rather than cluttered painful pieces of it. What I thought I could never make sense of started to have meaning and clarity – like seeing something in an old grainy photograph that I hadn’t seen before. I finally made sense of how incest could move into a family and take root pushing out all the air and light and possibility.

There are astounding revelations about family history, an innate determination to save my own life through galvanizing work as an artist, and my ability to find the healing I needed to understand the generational legacy of abuse, neglect, and child abandonment that was handed down like soiled heirlooms.

Comfort, Texas will give hope to all survivors and the people who care about them. While we will never forget what happened to us as children, we can, with good therapy and healthy relationships, and gaining the knowledge that helps us understand the complexity of child abuse, move on, and claim sovereignty over our minds and bodies.

Editorial Reviews

The night walk? Buttercups in the moonlight? People snoring through open windows and a Jesus who never shows up? These are heartbreakingly beautiful and leave me with an absolute atmosphere of the piece—the emotional center of gravity on this one is huge and lasting and utterly devastating.
Rachel Starnes – Author of The War at Home: A Wife's Search for Peace (and Other Missions Impossible) Penguin Books

Rachel Starnes