From age four to eighteen Sue William Silverman was sexually abused with numbing regularity by her father, a high-ranking government official and successful banker. Rendered in often graphic detail, her story annihilates our complacency about who among us could commit such evil - and who could stop it, for this is also a story of complicity, of the blaming silence with which Silverman's mother met her daughter's clear signals of distress.

Exposing the inner contours of a family in crisis, Silverman shows how their situation persisted for so long - unreported, undetected, and unconfessed - and how the ordeal colored and controlled her life well into adulthood.