I have just started to read a book I bought as a result of Sharon Rawlette’s powerful review. The book is so compelling I thought I’d better not wait to finish reading it before flagging up its existence, most of all perhaps because, if my several searches are anything to go by, it puzzlingly seems to still lie below the radar of mainstream and professional reviewers. It’s perhaps no coincidence that, at this point, all four reviewers on the US Amazon site seem to be women. We’ve met this problem of remorseless malignity before on this blog, but scarcely at all from the point of view of the victim, yet this surely is an important perspective we should not ignore.
I am not even half-way through the book yet, but its perfectly chosen, breathless stifling style creates in me, as reader, the same trapped feelings of relentless pressure, confusion and blindness, as the writer experienced while these traumatic events were unfolding over a period of years. As Sharon says, it is indeed brilliantly written, and is causing me to wonder how many times I’ve been taken in by such ruthless deployers of unscrupulous charm. The book is an essential read if only because it poses that question to all of us in a way that permits no evasion.
As I steel myself to continue with her intensely affecting story, I struggle to believe her at times. How can someone so obviously capable as the writer of this book have been a victim for so long? Maybe this only adds further weight to the case she is making. Her FB page convinces me of her integrity. Maybe my reaction suggests that the victim’s perspective in such situations will often seem inherently incredible, a bias our society might need to be on guard against if our judicial system is to be effective.
Below is a short extract from Sharon’s excellent review: for the full post see link.
“You will learn that when the truth isn’t pretty, expected, or delivered with a fair dose of charm, people will almost always put their faith in a lie.” So reads one of many chilling lines in H.G. Beverly‘s recently released memoir The Other Side of Charm, about her unwitting marriage to a sociopath.
Before her marriage to Wyatt, Beverly believed – as I imagine most of us do – that evil is recognizable. “Like most anyone else,” she says, “you’ll think that evil must be somewhat easy to identify it might come right at you with a gun or it might have squinty or buggy eyes or it might be a man trying to trick you into his car or it might be a creepy uncle who pats little children on the bottom all the time.” But evil came to her in the form of a charming, romantic man she’d known since they were kids, a man who professed all of her values for family and farm and forever, and then, the very week of their wedding, abruptly changed. Oh, he still professed all those things to everyone else. He was still as charismatic as could be – when he was in public. But she soon realized with horror that, in private, he was none of those things. In private, he was capable of the worst sorts of physical and mental abuse, for which he felt absolutely no remorse. And no one outside her family would believe it. He was so charming, after all. The problem must be her.
Everybody Means Something 