The Book of Emmett

“An estimated 3.8 million people (20%) aged 18 years and over have experienced violence (physical and/or sexual) by an intimate partner or family member since the age of 15, including: 27% of women (2.7 million) 12% of men (1.1 million)” I can quote from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 21/22 report.

Staggering statistics considering that I have never experienced domestic violence in my family nor do I know anyone that has. Occasional mentions have happened over the years. The lady who I worked with who came in occasionally with a black eye, there were rumours. A friend of my wife once told us that her father had hit her mother several times over the years, but little else was ever mentioned.

Even though a novel to say I was in shock of the violence that was committed on a family by a drunken father has left me astonished if this could even be half true. The author Deborah Forster has stated that it is vaguely based on her own family experience. Good grief. Did others suffer?

The Book of Emmett begins with a funeral for the violent father. This is his eponymous book. It tells via third party narrative what he did to an undeserving family and how his savage cruelness caused not only the death of one of his children but left the survivors in a state of never living a life without him dominating just about everything they did from a young age of fear through to a lifetime of memory that seemed to become a love/hate middle age to his children and only memories of him giving her children she loved to his wife. This is a brutal telling of family forced into dysfunctionality.

I accept that books such as this are not entertaining and some will not enjoy it but it was hard not to keep reading as it was so powerfully thought provoking, such that it will live with me for a long time.