By
– September 13, 2011
In House Rules, Rachel Sontag is asked, “So, who’s the monster?” She replies, “My father,” I said. “He plays the leading monster.” In this fast-paced, well-written memoir, the nuance of Sontag’s emotional abuse as a child reared in an upper-middle- class Jewish home by a physician father and social-worker mother is reenacted. Sontag astutely notes that the plight of the abused child derives from “occupying the center of someone’s universe,” in her case, her father’s. Her sister, in contrast, is the neglected child whose role it is to remain safely invisible. Both siblings are imprisoned by an ineffectual mother who fails to protect. Sontag struggles to set herself free, only to learn that she has internalized some of the evil through identification with the aggressor. She enables the audience to palpably sense the subtle divide between “normal” parental negativity and emotional punishment. We are rewarded for our efforts through Sontag’s resilience. Sontag leaves the reader recognizing traces of her tale within their own life and those around them.
Audrey Freshman, Ph.D , LCSW, CASAC, is a psychotherapist with a private practice located in Rockville Centre, NY. Dr. Freshman is the Associate Director of an outpatient substance abuse agency and the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions.