Little Girl Fly Away - Hardcover

Stone, Gene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671780859 ISBN 13: 9780671780852

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1994

Synopsis

An in-depth psychological study explores the true story of Ruth Finley, a childhood rape victim who developed a split personality and who unknowingly wrote herself death threats, culiminating in a self-kidnapping and stabbing

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

The painful story of a Wichita, Kansas, woman who learns through psychotherapy that the homicidal maniac stalking her resides in her subconscious self, a product of repressed, long- buried memories of sexual child abuse. With her full cooperation, journalist Stone recounts Ruth Finley's life from the day in 1977 when she received the first nasty phone call to June 1988, when she attended her last therapy session. Finley's husband, Ed, had gone into the hospital at about the time a Kansas serial killer resurfaced. According to her analyst, Dr. Andrew Pickens, those events jarred Finley's subconscious into creating ``the Poet,'' a vicious man who harassed her for the next several years by letter and phone, who threw eggs at her house and left all manner of things on her porch--rocks, feces, a red bandanna, a Molotov cocktail. He cut her phone lines and accosted her on the street and at the mall. Then, in November 1978, Finley reported that she was abducted by two men who took her paycheck and other items. She got away, but on another occasion, the Poet attacked her in a mall parking lot, stabbing her repeatedly. She managed to escape and drove home with the knife still stuck in her side and one of the assailant's gloves hanging from a window. All very real to Ruth Finley, but police chief Richard LaMunyon doubted her stories; his department had kept her and ``the Poet'' under surveillance for years, without result. (LaMunyon still contends that Finley was fully cognizant of her actions and therefore criminally liable.) Finley began intensive therapy with Dr. Pickens, who suspected that she suffered from a ``dissociative disorder,'' divorcing her conscious self from painful experience. Through therapy, Finley allowed ``negative memories of her childhood to slip out.'' Referring to herself as that ``little girl,'' she brings forth recollections of brutal sexual assaults by an unnamed neighbor when she was three years old. Stone's evenhanded, serious treatment of this material keeps it from being unbearable or cheaply sensational. (8 pages b&w photos--not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In 1977 Ruth Finley, 47 years old, married, a mother and living in Witchita, Kans., began to receive disturbing letters. The letters gave way to harassment, which in turn culminated in her kidnapping and stabbing by the elusive criminal dubbed the "Poet." After four frustrating years the case was solved when a new police chief deduced that only Ruth herself could be the Poet. This deeply moving account re-creates not only the supposed crime but also the successful psychotherapy which followed. For five years, Ruth was treated by a psychiatrist named Andrew Pickens, gradually revealing that she had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse and that, while not suffering from multiple personality disorder, she still had the abused little girl in her psyche and that girl, resentful that no one had come to the adult Ruth's aid when her husband was stricken ill, became the Poet. Freelance writer Stone tells Ruth's engrossing, bizarre story with great sensitivity. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0671780859
• ISBN 13: 9780671780852
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256