Debora Harding - Dancing with the Octopus: A Memoir of a Crime

More Praise for Dancing with the Octopus

Dancing with the Octopus is a brave and authentic picture of the tailwinds of trauma, the limits of human forgiveness, and what it takes to maintain hope in a world bent on breaking us. Highly readable and deeply moving.

Rachel Louise Snyder, award-winning author of No Visible Bruises

Bravely looks at her family trauma and the hope of restorative justicecombining wit, drama, and deep self-reflection to investigate the aftershocks of a devastating crime.

Oxygen , The Best True Crime Books of 2020 for Holiday Gifting

A gripping account of one womans confrontation with the terror and heartbreak of her past. Harding combines true crime and family saga to illustrate the aftershocks of trauma and the courage, tenderness, and humor that recovery requires.

Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

This moving story of grit and resilience will resonate with readers long after the final page is turned.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A gripping memoir, Dancing with the Octopus is both a heartbreaking reconstruction of a crime and a powerful account of healing from trauma.

Electric Literature , Most Anticipated Debuts of the Second Half of 2020

Hardings writing is exquisite, often funny This book is personal, deeply and bravely thoughtful, and creatively expressed It can serve as a tool for the politically engaged.

New York Journal of Books

Darkly humorous Harding draws a complex web of interlinked experiences to show how suffering can set up shop for good in a family and a town. Dancing with the Octopus joins a host of recent true crime memoirs dedicated to grounding crimes in a wider framework of social and familial contexts.

CrimeReads , Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020

An incredible book Debora writes with a lightness of touch that belies the heavy lifting in a work of such magnitude and power.

Philip Selway of Radiohead, on Twitter

This is a fantastic memoir beautifully written and its an excellent example of traumas long hold on people An incredible look at depression and parenthood and forgiveness It is excellent.

Book Riot s All the Books podcast

Compelling Harding is completely honest, whether describing her wariness, defiance, bewilderment, self-doubt, or the truths she eventually discovered about herself and her parents Her unsparing and candid observations allow readers to really get to know this strong, determined survivor.

Booklist

Debora Harding writes with a stunningly original mixture of insight, wit, and humanity about a life packed with so much drama, loss, and resilience that you cant believe its not an epic work of fiction.

Kate Weinberg, author of The Truants

In this compelling and unflinching memoir which switches between past and present, Harding unravels the impact of this random act of violence and of her dysfunctional childhood. Its a tale of trauma and PTSD, but also of recovery through the healing power of restorative justice, and of enduring love.

The Bookseller (editors choice)

A searing literary work that will help many of us see trauma in a different light. In strong and powerful prose Debora Harding shows us what it means to move forward through grief.

Julia Samuel, author of This Too Shall Pass

Gripping You are drawn in straightaway.

BBC Radio 2

Extraordinary, so powerful, and like nothing Ive read. Astonishing book. It deserves to be the most massive hit.

Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth

I have just finished reading Dancing with the Octopus You are lucky! The electricity of this true crime memoir awaits you.

Lemn Sissay, author of My Name Is Why , on Twitter

Debora Hardings book is a beautiful and exacting monument to resilience and recovery.

The Telegraph

Its as gripping as any thriller and as moving as any novel youre ever likely to read.

Paul Chahidi, actor, on Twitter

A powerful true story about a violent crime, a dysfunctional family, resilience, reckoning, and recovery.

BBC Womans Hour

With remarkable narrative skill, Harding untangles the lingering effects of family dysfunction and criminal trauma. This is a page-turner with a deep heart and soul, full of forgiveness but demanding of accountability.

BookPage , Best Books of 2020: Memoirs

A sharp, compelling recollection of abuse, gaslighting, and the process of trauma Ultimately, Dancing with the Octopus is a book about telling and the power of retelling an act carried out with wit, grace, and humor by an author of her own narrative truth.

Cambridge Review of Books

An often-wrenching but clear-eyed look at the crime, Hardings life, and the hard work of therapy and recovery.

Omaha World-Herald

Her book is more than a heartbreakingly disturbing account of childhood abuse in the United States, in the vein of Tara Westovers Educated . A third, parallel strand explores her love for her kind, devoted father and carefully extracts moments of real happiness from the chaos of her early life. Having braced myself for misery, I found these sections the most impressive part of the book.

The Guardian

For my husband, Thomas You are the most beautiful of humans

CONTENTS

Life would be tragic if it werent funny.

STEPHEN HAWKING

Lincoln, 2003 The truth began to emerge when I saw Charles Goodwin sitting at a white Formica table in a Nebraska prison canteen, waiting for his parole hearing. I wasnt expecting to recognize him in a crowd, but when I observed his dark brown eyes scanning the room, I felt the pulse of memory kick in, and when it did, a passage of history, a quarter of a century, all but disappeared.

It wasnt the first occasion Id struggled with a disproportionate sense of time. I certainly didnt expect that when I learned to read a clock, it would turn into an exercise of such great profundity or that this would be my first major concession to there being a science and order to our universe. One has to learn to add multiples of 5 all the way to 60, often at an age when you are barely able to count to 10. Then you have to learn that 60 minutes equal 1 hour, 24 hours equal 1 day, 7 days make up 1 week, and 365 days make up a year, which is the time it takes the earth to orbit the sun, with the exception being the fourth year, when we leap ahead by a day.

For the earth to orbit the sun twenty-five times seems an enormous distance to travel. But for me, time often operates with rules disconnected from the workings of the universerandomly bending with an emotional weight of metric tonnage proportion before disappearing into one black hole.

Lincoln, 2003 Charles Goodwin had spent twenty-five years in Nebraska state prisons. He appeared to be in his element, not overly anxious. His hands, folded, rested on a thick hardback book whose title was Revelation: A Book of Judgment . Perched on top were a spiral notebook and pen.

His looks were pleasant enough, his hair closely shaven. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt, baggy jeans, and neutral-colored sneakers. There was nothing in him of the aggressive body language that was common in this environment. He appeared fit, no doubt from hours spent in the prison gym, but he hadnt acquired that machismo bodybuilder look.

About fifty prisoners sat or stood around, waiting their turn to appear in front of the parole board. None lacked for companyparents, a wife, friends, a few even had kids to broaden the audience, so the energy of the room had the backstage buzz of a school Christmas pageant.