After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening

Waking up to find a sexual predator standing at the foot of your bed is one of the great imaginable nightmares. Would you scream? Dr. Nancy McCabe, the award-winning author of this compelling book, tried.

The Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening is an elegantly written memoir about a violated woman's determination to reclaim control of her emotions by defining her identity. Afraid of what she might find, she begins a painful journey through her past, a journey that shines a bright light on the agony of growing up on the outside looking in.

Is she the ditsy blonde her family remembers?

The child who resolves to never mistreat others?

A teenager who wears odd, homemade clothes and only has one friend?"

The high school student harassed and assaulted by a group of boys when the teacher leaves the room?

For the author, life on the periphery is a tortured existence best examined with resonating metaphors that entwine the past and the present. For the amnesiac, the time traveler, the feral child, the world becomes a landmine requiring constant negotiation to heal the rifts between familiarity and strangeness. That tension of identity is especially compelling for those of us who always saw ourselves as outsiders: a larger-than-life representation of that experience, but with the startling freshness of a poet's vision.

It is that poet's vision that makes The Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening soar with searing imagery, fresh language, and intense reflection. But remembering isn't enough for McCabe and like all obsessed writers she only feels alive when turning thoughts into words.

I wonder, can you really teach those possibilities, those joys; how a concrete image can ground you, how the right metaphor can lift you out of yourself and give you perspective. How a metaphor, like a semi-colon, can forge new links and make you feel less alone in the world. How the vast possibilities, the arrangements and rearrangements of words, make the world around you feel at once more and less substantial, more intricate but less weighty, so that one good paragraph gives you courage. How writing can be like deep sea diving, plunging down to a deep part of yourself where there is wreckage but also jewels to be retrieved, to be pulled back to the calm surface so that the next day you go around grinning foolishly, feeling a weird secret joy.

Now that is writing.

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A chess player, target archer, and avid hiker, T. J. Forrester has had short stories accepted for print publication in Literary Potpourri, UpDare?, and Storyteller. Represented by the Creative Media Agency, he is the author of Three Trails, Five Bears, and One French Kiss, a creative non-fiction manuscript about his hiking adventures.

Article on Nancy McCabe and Literary Potpourri

Excerpt of Memoir published in Lit Pot MidMonth January 03

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