A Captivity No Novelist Could Invent

By JANET MASLIN
NYT

A STOLEN LIFE A Memoir
By Jaycee Dugard
Illustrated. 273 pages.
Simon & Schuster. $24.99.

“I would love to be a writer someday,” Jaycee Dugard wrote in her journal in 2002. “I love to write. I have no idea what I would write about.”

Two years later, on a list titled “My Dreams for the Future,” she included “See Pyramids,” “Swim with dolphins” and “Write a best seller.”

Ms. Dugard’s memoir, “A Stolen Life,” arrived on Tuesday. It is an instant best seller, and she did not lack for material. Hers is a story of her being yanked out of her normal life at the age of 11; spending 18 years imprisoned by the convicted rapist Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy; and bearing two daughters by Mr. Garrido. She describes these events with dignified, hard-hitting understatement, recreating her initial naïveté about the monstrousness of her situation.

Early in the book, after describing how she was knocked out with a stun gun, forced into a car and taken to the ramshackle backyard where she would spend much of her life, she recalls: “I ask him if I can put my clothes back on. He chuckles and says no. I ask him when I can go home. He says he doesn’t know but he will work on it. I say my family doesn’t have a lot of money, but they would pay a ransom to get me back. He looks at me and smiles and says, really?” No horror writer could make that moment more chilling.

(More here.)