'An abuser gets inside your head and creates the world for you'

Margaux Fragoso’s memoir – a child’s-eye view of paedophilia – has been criticised for its voyeurism and ‘soft-porn’ content, and praised for its insight. But has it helped her move on with her life

"I STILL think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time. At two in the afternoon, when he would come and pick me up and take me for rides; at five, when I would read to him, head on his chest; in the despair at 7pm . . . when he would hold me and rub my belly for an hour; in the despair again at 9pm when we would go for a night ride, down to the Royal Cliffs Diner in Englewood Cliffs where I would buy a cup of coffee with precisely seven sugars and a lot of cream. We were friends, soul mates and lovers. I was seven. He was 51.”

The now 32-year-old Margaux Fragoso is promoting her memoir of the “entanglement” with the man she first approached in a New Jersey public swimming pool in 1985. The unique selling point is that the “relationship” continued for 15 years and ended only when Peter Curran jumped off a cliff at the age of 66, leaving her 10 suicide notes and a clapped-out car.

We meet in Penguin’s London office, where she is being closely minded. She is wearing a pretty top, jeans, socks and trainers. Her voice is high-school girlish, her manner wary. Her fragility is palpable.

Samples of this reporter’s work had been requested beforehand, suggesting she is suspicious of interviewers.

The book has polarised the critics. Some, like Kathryn Harrison in the New York Times, see it as "yet another opportunity to open our eyes and redeem ourselves"; but Jenny Diski in the Guardiancalls it "as dreary a read as soft porn. It will titillate paedophiles and fantasists, but for most people, reading it will have the dismal lowering effect either of reality TV or of a very bad novel."

Fragoso has read them all and claims this is "exactly" what she anticipated: "I expected the book would evoke strong reactions . . . " While the reviews in America "were extremely positive on the whole", she says, the reaction in the UK "was more complicated. What surprised me the most, perhaps, was the use of legal talk such as 'indecent exposure' and 'pornography' . . . Pornography is meant to be erotic, and the sexual scenes in Tiger, Tigeraren't . . ."

CERTAINLY, THERE IS value in the child’s-eye unfurling of the stomach-churning, slow grooming of a lonely little girl by a paedophile.

His home is a higgledy-piggledy, fuggy world of primary colours, Christmassy glitter, chattering birds, menageries of hamsters and iguanas, rabbits and guinea pigs and a big, friendly furry dog. A magical world where adult rules don’t apply.

For an only child, dominated by her father’s violent moodswings and sense of “honour” and her mother’s mental illness, it is heady stuff. “Spending time with a paedophile can be like a drug high . . . He can make the child’s world . . . ecstatic somehow,” writes Fragoso.

The reader’s heart contracts at the first mentions of the tickling games, the “reward” kisses on the lips, the inventive distractions to lure her away from adults, the man-child’s sly, wheedling, juvenile rationalisations. “He always found ways to make me accept more touching when I was past my threshold.”

Then her need to detach herself from a sexual act, to dissociate her head from her body, "the tingles and prickles that meant my body was falling asleep". When she "disappoints" him or is separated from him for a couple of years (because people have begun to talk), other little girls appear, making her resolve to do better. For his 52nd birthday, she agrees to perform oral sex on him; while he gives directions, she mentally escapes into the Tall Book of Fairy Tales.

It is clear there is no sexual pleasure in it for her. But she loved him and went on loving him, long past the time when her adolescent body was becoming repellent to him and he grew ill and impotent. By the time he died, she was 22, still reading to him, but in a “serious” relationship with a young man named Anthony.

It’s not clear how long it took her to realise that their “relationship” was one of criminal child abuse, with all its inter-related horrors – a profound sense of shame, inability to sustain school friendships, targeting by bullies.

As the book develops, we learn that she has moved on to college, made friends, moved in with Anthony, and become head teacher at a Catholic pre-school. But the transition appears seamless. She denies this is deliberate, saying she “didn’t choose to write about [the transformation] at all, although nothing about the transition from the days when I was under Peter’s spell to the current day was smooth.

“Perhaps it strikes some readers as a flaw because they are used to those kinds of transitions being provided in order to emphasise that this is what the book is about: the transformation from a disordered person to a healthy one. To me, that represents one kind of narrative and Tiger, Tiger isn’t that book. I’m less interested in the idea of presenting ‘a chaos to stability’ narrative than I am in exploring the idea of keeping some form of stability and identity within horrible situations. To me that concept is much more uplifting than the idea of redemption.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone finding anything uplifting in the numbing series of sexual violations, the sense that everyone knows you to be a child “whore”, the shadow of his increasing violence, her attempted suicide and assault by a counsellor in the psychiatric hospital.

Which is why many critics question the purpose of the memoir. In her afterword, she says that through it, she had “worked to break the old, deeply rooted patterns of suffering and abuse that have dogged my family through generations”.

But it contains no deeper message, writes the British psychologist Oliver James. “The main emotions it evokes are depression and, occasionally, the feeling of being the voyeur of a lot of domestic nastiness . . . In writing books for the public, it is not enough to just make others feel as depressed or empty as you. This is a sorry tale which just makes you feel . . . sorry,” he writes.

“If her motive truly was to break destructive patterns, good luck to her, I hope she succeeded. By all means write it out for herself. Why do we need to hear the story?”

By contrast, the sexual scenes hardly registered with him. “Exaggerated by publicity-seeking publishers, the intimate details should not disgust or trouble most adults . . .”

ONE OF THE BOOK’S few mercies is that Curran had no interest in penetrative sex and technically, Fragoso remained a virgin until the age of 16, when she decided she wanted a baby with him in order to find a home. The “sexuality” as she calls it, stopped when she was 17, “when he was impotent basically . . . ”. But she remained his “friend”.

“It’s hard to understand if you haven’t been through it,” says Fragoso. “Those conflicted feelings show how an abuser can get inside your head and create the world for you . . . You stay because you become very attached and very afraid of change. You don’t have any self-esteem after you’ve been abused for all that time. You need a lot of self-esteem in order to create identity, to make new friends, to get a boyfriend . . . And where could I get self-esteem from . . . ?”

Which, of course, is the vital link she has chosen to omit.

She says now that she first revealed the abuse to a college professor by way of a memoir-writing exercise. The teacher’s policy “was not to respond to the content but to respond to it as a work – that it was inappropriate for her to say something personal, that it would have just been stifling and I would have stopped writing”.

In the interview, she will concede only that she has received specialist trauma therapy used on Vietnam war veterans and continues to see a therapist. Her distress is most pronounced when discussing the school bullying which she hasn’t yet “dealt with”. Or when talking about how her abuser “stole my childhood. And he did, he DID, he stole from me, stole from me” .

What would she say to Peter if he was sitting here now and arguing that society has it all wrong?

“What I would say is that the harm you’ve done is that you’ve used me, for your own pleasure. I was not interested in sex . . . I might have wanted you to chase me, I didn’t want you to touch me . . . I would say, how COULD you, how could you misuse me, how COULD you tell me I’m the only one when you knew you had abused other children?”

Her voice rises and quivers.

“Because I saw his court records right in front of my face . . .”

Her first sight of those 1989 court records just a year ago – revealing four criminal charges against him for abuse of a foster child – was a “trauma” for her, which suggests that she was still in denial at some level up to then about the true nature of their relationship.

“ . . . I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just trying to survive . . .”

She is now married (although she pointedly evades the question as to whether she married Anthony), with a daughter.

“There is no follow-up in the works,” she says. “Right now, I’m very happy to write my novel, which is fiction, and I’m also working on poetry and essays.”

Is she happy? “I’m sad during times when being sad is normal and happy when I’m thinking or doing happy things. When I see myself get emotional talking about my past, it seems to me a sign of mental health.”