For readers of Educated and The Glass Castle, a harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring Memoir of childhood trauma and its long reach into adulthood, named one of the Best True Crime Books by Marie Claire.
She splits her time between the United States and Great Britain..
She is mother of two children and is now a full-time writer and activist.
While cycling across America she met her English husband.
About author(s): Debora Harding grew up in the Midwest and then spent three decades immersed in Washington politics.
Written with dark humor and the pacing of a thriller, Dancing with the Octopus is a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking narrative of reckoning, recovery, and the inexhaustible strength it takes to survive.
Dexterously shifting between the past and present, Debora Harding untangles the incident of her kidnapping and escape from unexpected angles, offering a vivid, intimate portrait of one family\'s disintegration in the 1970s Midwest.
This was a quest for the truth that would threaten the lie at the heart of her family and with it the sacred bond that once saved her.
It wasn\'t until decades later - when beset by the symptoms of PTSD- that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and reimagine his complex story.
Denial became the family coping strategy offered by her fun-loving, conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother.
She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move on.
Debora survived.
She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom, and then left to die as an ice storm descended over the city.
One Omaha winter day in November 1978, when Debora Harding was just fourteen, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot.
For readers of Educated and The Glass Castle, a harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring Memoir of childhood trauma and its long reach into adulthood, named one of the Best True Crime Books by Marie Claire
