Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558613959
Publication Date: 08-01-2002

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In this honest and outspoken reflection on her childhood, Louise DeSalvo explores the many ways literature saved her, both emotionally and practically. Born to Italian immigrants during World War II, DeSalvo takes readers back to the emotional chaos of her 1950s girlhood in New Jersey, growing up with her authoritative, distant father, her depressed mother, and a sister who later committed suicide. Reading and research were an anchor to her then, and widened her choices about her future in ways that weren’t otherwise available to girls of that era.

A Virginia Woolf scholar, DeSalvo wrote a ground-breaking study on the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the reclusive writer. Here, she mines her own early days—and her adolescent obsession with Hitchcock’s Vertigo—in an attempt to give her own life’s path “some shape, some order.”

"DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Very creative . . . Vertigo brings the past to the present and transforms pain into power and pleasure." —Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero

"One of the pleasures of Vertigo is its continual sense that DeSalvo's own history is as mysterious to her as it might be to us, that she, like her reader, is a stranger in a strange land, a perpetual traveler." —Newsday

"Gripping and compelling. . . . DeSalvo digs deep and has written a profound work of emotional healing." —Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt