Customer Reviews

Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speak-Out on Incest

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This was the first mainstream U.S. book to address the issue of incest. It's highly accessible but deeply disturbing, filled with tragic, individual stories of assaults, mostly by fathers and perpetrated upon daughters. Armstrong did her homework. I got to know her in New York in the late 70s through a mutual friend, and she was a warm, intelligent, and compassionate woman. I wish I could find her today to let her know how my own story has ended up. But anyway, read this book if you are a survivor who needs to know you're not alone, a perpetrator who is on the road to recovery (though there is never 100% recovery for them, and I would not trust one completely with anyone under the age of 16), or just someone interested in this field of criminal psychology from a layman's perspective.

Louise Armstrong (1937-2008) was a writer, feminist, and activist, was also faculty of the Institute of Children's Literature and chaired a committee on family violence for the National Women's Health Network (1979-1984). She also wrote several other books.

Here are some quotations from this 1978 book:

"What kind of working taboo has such a high incidence of violation?" (Pg. 7)
"...when you speak of someone being just like a father, are you describing a sexual relationship? Why is it necessary for men to eroticize all positive, affectionate, even sensual responses?" (Pg. 132)
"It's troubling that a major part of these treatment programs---while helping the father understand he has done something wrong and take responsibility for what he did---ask mother to swallow her share of the blame, too." (Pg. 204)
"And the more I talked with people, the more I sensed a curious inflection: The innuendo I heard seemed to suggest that the fact that a woman is a prostitute somehow explains the sexual abuse, rather than the other way around." (Pg. 266)
"Also, many women shared a sense of the loss of BOTH parents. While it's true that many of the women I spoke to were angrier at their mothers than at their fathers, I feel that the very violence of our reactions against our mothers, our greater fury with them, shows not how much at fault they were, but rather how much MORE we needed from them, how much more we were conditioned to expect." (Pg. 267-268)
"It seems apparent, both its incidence and by the noticeable absence of any sincere, widespread dread of retribution, that incest is not truly a taboo. Just a very, very long-lived, well-suppressed secret." (Pg. 272)