A devastating memoir of stolen childhood, Tiger, Tiger has sold in 19 countries and is poised to be an international sensation.

One summer day, Margaux Fragoso swam up to Peter Curran at a public swimming pool and asked him to play. She was seven; he was fifty-one. When Curran invited her and her mom to see his house, the little girl found a child's dream world, full of odd pets and books and music and magical toys. Margaux's mother was devoted, but, beset by mental illness and frightened of her abusive husband, she was only too ready to take advantage of an escape for the daughter she felt incapable of taking care of on her own. Soon Margaux was spending all her time with Peter, and any suspected signs of child abuse were overlooked.

 

In time, Peter insidiously took on the role of Margaux's playmate, father, lover and captor. Charming and repulsive, warm and violent, loving and manipulative, Peter burrowed into every aspect of Margaux's life and transformed her from a girl fizzing with imagination and affection into a deadened, young/old woman, suffering from serious post-traumatic stress and on the brink of suicide. But when she was twenty-two, it was Peter -- ill, and terrified at the thought of losing her -- who killed himself, at the age of sixty-six.

 

With lyricism and mesmerizing clarity, Margaux Fragoso has unflinchingly explored the darkest episodes of her life, helping us see how pedophiles work hidden away in the open to steal childhood. In writing Tiger, Tiger, she has healed herself of a wound that was fourteen years in the making. This extraordinary memoir is an unprecedented glimpse into the heart and mind of a monster; but more than this, it illustrates the power of memory and truth-telling to heal, and hopefully provides help toward child abuse prevention.

Margaux Fragoso recently completed a Ph.D. in English and creative writing at Binghamton University in New York. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Literary Review and Barrow Street, among other literary journals. She lives in New Orleans.

Margaux Fragoso's profile page

"In this gut-wrenching memoir of sexual abuse, Fragoso...explores with unflinching honesty the ways in which pedophiles can manipulate their way into the lives of children...Using her own diaries...Fragoso eloquently depicts psychological and sexual abuse in disturbing detail."

Publishers Weekly

"The honesty of the author's account, told in the sort of visceral, child's-eye detail that only trauma can preserve, draws the reader into the skewed logic of their world, until we forget how this story is bound to end."

Globe & Mail

"Brave, dark, and horrifying; Fragoso manages to elicit dignity and humanity from the most depraved souls to tell an unforgettable survivor's story. Get it. Read it. NOW!"

Library Journal

"Fragoso is pitiless in her account of the twisted codependence she shared. Using material culled from diaries and daily letters exchanged with Peter, she describes certain scenes in...unflinching detail...But if secrets and lies make abusers successful, Tiger, Tiger takes power away from them by articulating the unspeakable, encouraging readers to break their own silence."

Georgia Straight

"The question the book poses, and answers, is how exactly does something like this happen?"

Geist

"Fragoso's narrative style is stark and simple. She doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable details of her sexual abuse and she relates her story without flourishes or melodrama...Although Fragoso doesn't say it outright, her memoir feels partially like a warning -- the boogeyman doesn't always hide in the dark."

Winnipeg Free Press

"Margaux writes with great emotion about the vulnerability of youth, and how when love is lacking at home, it can cause bad things in life to become reality. This is gripping reading, which may make you want to hug your child a little tighter after finishing the book. 5 Bookmarks (out of five)."

Shelf Life

"In wincingly frank, graphic scenes, [Fragoso] intricately details her harrowing evolution from a doe-eyed innocent girl to a broken, emotionally scarred victim who, at 22, was further crushed after receiving Curran's 10 handwritten suicide notes along with the key to his car. Culled from the four diaries she kept during the ordeal, Fragoso writes with searing honesty about her serpentine entanglement and of Curran's calculated, menacing exploitation of her. Intensive psychotherapy and new motherhood provide a hopeful coda to her unspeakable experience. A gripping, tragic and unforgettable chronicle of lost innocence and abuse."

Kirkus Reviews

"Tiger, Tiger, is a memoir and we expect to see reviewers spilling a lot of ink in their efforts to describe it...it's unusually thoughtful and well-written, and it has a lot more than shock value to recommend it."

The Observer's Very Short List

"It may, in fact, be Curran's one stroke of good fortune in an otherwise luckless existence that he fastened upon a victim capable of understanding his actions -- a victim who, in this unvarnished and starkly written memoir, could fairly tell his story as well as her own."

National Post

"Fragoso manages to tell a disturbing story beautifully, leading readers into the secret world she inhabited for decades and even inspiring a modicum of sympathy for the man who manipulated and abused her. Hoping for some closure and healing -- and perhaps to issue a warning -- Fragoso knows she had no choice but to speak up."

The Washington Post

"Like Nabokov's masterpiece with which it shares a theme, Tiger, Tiger draws its aesthetic success from the precise register of its prosaicness...Line-by-line, the horror imprints itself; the book's veracity can be easy to forget at times, since it reads so much like finessed fiction. But then you remember, and the factuality really stings...It's why Tiger, Tiger is such a feat: Its details are not devices; it's a work of recollection not rhetoric."

Boston Globe

"We dare you to turn away from these disturbing but beautifully written memoirs....We've read and heard stories like these before, but rarely in such clear, unsentimental prose."

O, the Oprah Magazine

"...remarkable debut..."

Globe & Mail Top 100

"With Tiger, Tiger, Fragoso has created from the ashes of her childhood a stunning, brave, personal book."

Edmonton Journal

"Astonishing...Many memoirs have been written by survivors of childhood sexual abuse, but never has one so fearlessly (and faithfully) depicted the complex dynamic that often exists between pedophiles and their victims. In doing so, Fragoso emerges not simply as a blank canvas for Curranís desires, but as a living, breathing, very powerful young woman who has walked through a believable (and often beautiful) sort of hell. That she is able to re-create this dark underworld so brilliantly reveals her as more than a survivor: First and foremost, Fragoso is an artist."

Marie Claire

"Tiger, Tiger offers us yet another opportunity to open our eyes and redeem ourselves."

New York Times

"A jarring and revelatory memoir about a girlhood spent with a profoundly damaged, and damaging, older man...it breaks the mold via Fragoso's vividly poetic descriptions of place and experience, her unflakeable old-soul empathy for the flawed souls who populated her childhood (even her transgressor), and the way in which she emerges from her vexed beginnings with a healing hand and a stalwart heart."

Elle Magazine

"In this gut-wrenching, disturbing memoir of sexual abuse, Fragoso explores with unflinching honesty the ways in which pedophiles can manipulate their way into the lives of children."

Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2011

"Tiger, Tiger is the story of Margaux's (d)evolving relationship not merely with a pedophile but with reality. It is a meditation on love and need and alienation and attachment, and on the human capacity for adapting to subjugation against an innate biological drive for freedom and autonomy."

New York Observer

"Fragoso manages to elicit dignity and humanity from the most depraved souls to tell an unforgettable survivor's story. Her insights into both the machinations of a pedophile and her struggle as a victim are brave, dark, and horrifying."

 

Library Journal

"Fragoso's writing is deft and worthy."

NPR

"With Tiger, Tiger, Fragoso has created from the ashes of her childhood a stunning, brave, personal book."

Regina Leader Post

"Tiger, Tiger will start a thousand conversations. Margaux Fragoso achieves the unthinkable with empathic clarity: she humanizes a pedophile. In doing so, she makes his crime unimaginably more frightening. Her portrayal of their relationship is shocking, revelatory and fearless. As the story of a victim, it is gripping; as a work of literature, it's a triumph."

Ms Alice Sebold, Author of "The Lovely Bones"