A scholar’s memoir of growing up and the powerful forces that shaped her as a woman and a writer; “her story will inspire all women” ( Library Journal ). 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.” Publisher’s Weekly said, “Her clarity of insight and expression make this [memoir] an impressive achievement,” and the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed, “DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around.” "The writing here is terrific." — Los Angeles Times "DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around." — San Francisco Chronicle "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 Louise DeSalvo is the author of Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge, Breathless, and the internationally acclaimed study Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, among other books. A professor of English at Hunter College in New York City, she lives in Teaneck, New Jersey. Used Book in Good Condition