Author Interview: Nanette Kirsch
A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed an astounding and heart-wrenching book called Denial: Life, Addiction, and a Life Derailed by Nanette Kirsch. This book is based on the true story of a man named Dave Wagner, one of the many people affected by childhood sexual abuse. Reading it was a very emotional experience, and it was unlike any other account of abuse I had ever read. It was a brutally honest portrayal of abuse, self-destruction, and the lingering damage of trauma. I had the opportunity to interview the author and ask her questions about the history behind this book, her approach to writing such a raw and complicated story, and how writing Denial impacted her. Nanette Kirsch is an author, marketing professional, and blogger based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. She has been the author of the blog Faith Runner since 2013, and Denial, published in June of this year, is her debut book.
-Interview-
Q: How did you come across Dave’s story?
Kirsch: As I mentioned in the preface, he was a good friend of the family, my husband and I in particular. When he died, his wife reached out to me in the months that followed. We were talking about and processing everything that had happened, the pain and the revelations that were coming out, and she said, “You should write a book about this. You’re a writer.” I never considered myself an author. I’m a marketing writer, so I didn’t take the offer very seriously. I think, at the time, the story she wanted was more to vindicate the suffering she had been through and the silence she had kept. She sent me a couple of boxes of documentation, and I kept those boxes unopened for five years. It wasn’t until I started dealing with lingering effects of sexual abuse that I had suffered in high school that I was drawn back to his story to look at the differences between the two of us. I had certainly struggled, but not at a life-threatening level. We both shared a faith, and mine led me to life and his didn’t. I had read his journal and seen some of that outcry, so it made me curious to understand the differences.
Q: Did you get a lot of the information for Denial from those boxes?
Kirsch: The first two were a start *laughs*. I started by creating a timeline based on the documentation I had, and every time I got through it, my friend would find something else. I ended up with three 3-inch binders full of documentation. Then, I did a series of interviews with people from different stages of Dave’s life, including his widow, to help shape the story.
Q: What was the process like with Dave’s family? Were they open to talking about what happened with him, or were they hesitant?
Kirsch: It varied by each people in his family. His wife was very willing, and I think it was healing as we reflected on things from her past. It brought a new understanding and some additional grief. There are five children, and some of the older children shared essays with me that they had written, but they weren’t too directly involved, and that was by design. They are still his kids, and I wanted to respect their privacy and their ability to grieve. One of his brothers also engaged with me and shared his memories and experiences.
Q: Were their any bits of information you were hesitant to include in the book?
Kirsch: I think all of it, honestly. One of the key tensions in the book is how you feel about Dave. It’s easy at the beginning, when he’s a child and he’s innocent, to feel great compassion, sympathy, and heartache for his pain, and then it gets more complicated on the other side. I wanted to be as honest as I could be and as compassionate as I could be, because there was a context, and if you missed it, it would just make him look like a jerk. I wrote very much with his family in mind, and as his children become adults I hope this is something that would answer questions for them and give them some compassion for their dad. I loved him. He was someone I cared deeply about. I tried to be really honest, but in a way that respected him and respected his family.
Q: When you hear or read other stories about abuse survivors, a lot of these stories talk about justice and healing. Dave’s story is very different. You talked about the unsavory aspects of his life. How important is it to tell the stories of those who don’t find justice or healing?
Kirsch: I think justice is the really hard part of any sexual abuse story, because I haven’t heard many where they found justice in the legal system or in confronting that person. Where I’ve heard that resolution has been within families. There’s a specific case of a woman I’ve come to know whose father abused her, and they confronted him and created some kind of accountability. I think, generally, it’s all really complicated. There’s an element of forgiveness. As a survivor, you first have to forgive yourself; because survivors think what happened to them was their fault. Part of the reason I think speaking your truth is so important is when you articulate why you think it was your fault from an adult perspective, you realize the lie that you’ve agreed to and how silly it is to think that a person put in a difficult situation has a chance to defend themselves. I’ve come to realize that it’s based on environmental conditions. Abuse happens in environments where an adult, who you don’t know all that well, is given respect they didn’t earn and access to your children that you wouldn’t give to someone else. I think a great model of this is in coaching. Coaches have access to kids that we would never give to another person. We’ll let them go away for a weekend with the coach and not be present. I think the justice and healing only comes from within the survivor, because our society is not really set up to bring very satisfactory justice. Where people find peace is the acknowledgment that what happened came at a cost, and there is a continuing cost of denying it. I hesitate to say everybody has to forgive his or her abuser, because that is a very hard thing, and not everybody gets there, but they can still find peace and wholeness without it.
Q: Denial is a very emotionally taxing book, and for survivors, reading it might reopen some wounds. Would you encourage them to read it anyway? What kind of lessons could they learn from reading the book?
Kirsch: I will say, specific to the abuse depictions in the book, I was intentionally very reserved. I don’t think anyone, survivor or otherwise, wants to read a detailed account of a child being sexually violated. That’s not what my book is about. The story is anchored in that to acknowledge that that was what started the events, but the message of the story does have value to survivors. Just like anything else, it’s a question of readiness. I can say from my own experience that I use to periodically contemplate it, and then come to the conclusion that it had no impact and put it away. That wasn’t a good enough answer, and it kept coming back. If people are willing to examine the cost of it to their lives and recognize that the cost will continue to mount for as long as you remain in denial, then it’s a good book to read. I think people who aren’t ready are not going to hear the message, and it’s important to be prepared to do the work that follows. There’s no way around it, there’s only through it. It’s hard, and it’s a painful process. I know there are situations where people don’t have a support system around them, so I think then I might not be the best idea, because you may be opening wounds you aren’t prepared to deal with. But people know. I’ve had a handful of people stop reading the book after they started, and that’s okay. It’s not for everyone. It’s for people who are really ready. I think it’s a really good book for people who haven’t been abused, because the data suggests that you know someone who has. Particularly with men, the denial is even greater, because they don’t have those close friendships. I think those women in their lives can be key to helping recognize the signs that things aren’t working for them and help get them to open up and pursue treatment, when they wouldn’t otherwise. You need to know what that looks like.
Q: You bring up the difference between male and female survivors and how they approach their experiences differently. Many authors who write similar stories tend to focus on female survivors. How important is it to discuss male survivors, and how do we create a safer space for men to come and discuss what happened to them?
Kirsch: That is one of the most important questions. Especially right now with all of the headlines we are seeing, 90% of which discuss women. It is in no way to lessen the suffering women have gone through. In writing this story and stepping into a male perspective, as a woman, I think I came to recognize a couple of things. One is, as women, for better or worse, we are conditioned to expect and how to respond to abuse from a pretty young age. We, as women, know and share those stories as part of our experience as women. Men are not similarly conditioned. We don’t teach our boy that’s part of what may happen in the same way we do females. Particularly, for heterosexual men, an unwanted sexual advance by a man is a power play, and it’s very damaging. If we are talking about people like Dave, a young boy on the verge of sexual maturity who’s being assaulted by a man, it raises personal questions about their sexuality. In a lot of cases, they have a physical response to that type of touch and violation, and it creates this confusion about who they are sexually. It can result in pretty strong homophobia. That was the case with Dave and other men that I’ve interviewed. There is a belief that, as a man, you should be able to defend yourself. You should be strong enough to overcome this. It creates a sense of shame and personal responsibility at a much higher level than what female survivors experience. Even though we feel that way, we are not as conditioned by society to believe that’s our responsibility. Women also do a lot better of creating and maintaining close confidences where you can share your deepest secrets. Many men don’t have that.
Q: As a survivor yourself, how did the process of writing the book effect you?
Kirsch: I think it was a positive experience. It was really hard at times. The book is a fiction, because I included facts of a real story that I knew, but I still had to tell a story. I didn’t have the opportunity to interview my character. I drew on my own experience and those of other survivors in order to craft some of those scenes. Writing the scenes of abuse pretty much wrung me out, because I had to go back and think about what I felt and how I recalled my own experiences. Having been through therapy before embarking on this, I think it was a healthy revisiting. It was a way to look at it from a distance and give myself a little credit. I was young, and I wasn’t equipped to defend myself, either. I think it was good. It was healing. At the end of the day, I feel really blessed by the opportunity to have something that was such a negative experience in my life and be able to use it.
Q: You said that Denial is a work of fiction based on a true story. What details did you change, and how did you decide on a particular approach to the story?
Kirsch: The things that I knew were true guided the story. What I knew for sure about my character was he had a really hard time up until the end, with those final journal entries, making a connection between his abuse and the things that were happening in his adult life. That’s a truth for a lot of survivors. That don’t clearly connect what happened with what is happening. I wanted that to be a theme of the story. I also came to believe, through the research and delving into this story, that there’s a spiritual stronghold that gets created. That was part of my own healing as well. In my own therapy, what I think turned the corner for me was recognizing that, as a person of faith, I couldn’t be close to God until I could be close to other people. I couldn’t be as close to other people as I was meant to be because that intimacy receptor in me got warped by abuse. What should feel good and close and trusting in my relationships felt dangerous. A lot of survivors experience that. We make intimacy the enemy. The bones of my story were not a person. The bones were the truth that I learned from my own experience and from his story about sexual abuse and how it impacts you throughout your life. I used facts from that personal account and from my imagination to put meat on the bones.
Q: A very important aspect of the book is religion. What can survivors who are not particularly religious take away from a book that focuses on that?
Kirsch: People who do not practice a religion have the option to, sort of, dismiss my preface and just read it as a story of a person who suffered sexual abuse and had all of those effects who just happened to be a person of faith who was victimized within that institution. There are a lot of people, regardless of their own personal faith, who have been victimized by churches and religion. When that is done in the name of religion, that’s a pretty complicated deal. Within the story itself, I tried very intensely to restrain my own faith perspective and only allow faith to enter the story when it was part of my character’s experience and how that complicated and compelled his particular experience with sexual abuse. My hope is the story is just as relevant, meaningful, and digestible to people who have little to no religious faith. It isn’t a Bible-thumping, “Jesus can heal you” kind of story.
Q: You’ve said in other interviews that you’ve discussed Denial at book clubs and college campuses. What has the general response been?
Kirsch: I’ve really been heartened by it. I’ve heard consistently that it’s a readable story, and people become engaged with the character and can’t put the book down. Most people I’ve talked to said, “Oh my gosh. I pushed everything aside and read it in a day or two,” and that’s really gratifying, as an author. It makes me feel really good. Even more importantly, most people said it has changed their thinking about sexual abuse. If they’re a survivor, I think they feel it has given a voice to the victim that didn’t exist before about just how profound the damage is in a way that makes them feel more seen and heard. For people who haven’t had a direct experience, it gets them thinking and asking questions about their own children and the situations where they experience risk. Hopefully, it makes them better receivers of that information for people in their lives—as in, “I didn’t know how to respond to someone who shared that information with me, and now I do.” I think those effects are what matter. Where I’m counting my results is the ability to touch lives and help people understand how serious this is.
I really enjoy this profound and meaningful discussion with Nanette, and it only made her book that much more impactful. Her advice for people who are interested in writing journalistic pieces like Denial is to just do it. Commit to it, look into resources, and get good editors. Most importantly, she advises bringing writing into different aspects of your life as a way to grow and improve your craft. I personally have a great interest in investigative journalism, so the time I spent talking to Nanette was very valuable. The story told in Denial: Abuse, Addiction, and a Life Derailed is an important one, and I encourage everyone to read it, so that survivors might find healing and others might find greater understanding.