Shannon Molloy’s 2020 memoir, Fourteen, recounted a childhood and adolescence of grisly homophobic violence. Yet many readers of that book – a bestseller, adapted for the stage and optioned for a film production – may find You Made Me This Way noteworthy in part because it reveals what Fourteen left out: the sexual abuse Molloy suffered, beginning at age five, at the hands of an older boy. This omission underscores one of the book’s central theses, that on average male victims of child sexual abuse find it harder than female victims to disclose their experiences. A conditioned reticence with grave implications – ‘[t]here is death in secrecy’. Molloy’s book, a hybrid of autobiography and journalism, takes socially important steps in assessing – and humanising – these implications.
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