Sue William Silverman

Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction (now available in paperback)
(W. W. Norton)

"In this powerful, often lyric memoir, a woman learns to value herself--as a whole person rather than as a sexual object. Recounting her past experiences as part of her journey toward recovery, Sue William Silverman explores her skewed belief that sex is love, a belief that began with her father's sexual abuse from early childhood into adolescence.

"She tells of college years in Boston, an early marriage in Galveston, and a roller-coaster life of sex and self-destructive behavior. Finally, having become addicted to danger itself, she hits bottom emotionally and spiritually. At this point, with the help of a trusted therapist, Silverman begins to discover the difference between the high of dangerous encounters and the more reliable promise of love.

"This utterly candid account may be the first book by a woman to examine sexual addiction. But the misguided search that became Silverman's life has resonance for other addictions, whether to food, drugs, alcohol, or work--anyone whose only satisfaction is now."

(Please click Love Sick title, above, to read an excerpt of the memoir and additional reviews.)

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
(University of Georgia Press)

"From age four to eighteen, Sue William Silverman was sexually abused with numbing regularity by her father, a high-ranking government official and successful banker. Rendered in often graphic detail, her story annihilates our complacency about who among us could commit such evil--and who could stop it, for this is also a story of complicity, of the blaming silence with which Silverman's mother meets her daughter's clear signals of distress. Exploring the inner contours of a family in crisis, Silverman shows how their situation persisted for so long--unreported, undetected, and unconfessed--and how the ordeal colored and controlled her life well into adulthood. From an anguished child who could find neither a strong enough voice nor the right words to an award-winning writer, 'Terror, Father' tells Silverman's unforgettable story of loss and recovery."

(Please click book title, above, to read excerpt.)

Hieroglyphics in Neon
Orchises Press (71 pages)

"Sue Silverman is widely known for the...often heartbreaking prose that limns personal experience. As she turns here to lyric, her words are still deft as deft knows how to be; the poignance remains; but what a range of things and people and events and humor pervades these mouth-filling pages.... She makes much of her sensory apparatus, as, given its acuteness, she is right to do; but there is also a fierce intelligence at work in Hieroglyphics in Neon, something rather akin to what the Augustans called Wit. Right brain, left brain, the whole human body: all conspire to make this book both a romp and a protracted meditation. Brava! ~~ Sydney Lea

Please click on title above to read selected poems. Thank you! (Please note: This poetry collection includes the poetry sequence "Hieronymus Bosch's Illustrated Alphabet.")

"Confessional & (Finally) Proud Of It"