Most people have a reason they have never read a book about child abuse. I had one too. For sixty-five years, mine was simple: I was the one it happened to, and I was not ready to look at it. This year I wrote it down anyway. Here is why I think you should read it.

By Kyle Smith | Author of The Secrets We Must Hold, Volume One

I want to tell you something honest before I tell you anything else. I did not set out to write a book about child abuse. I set out to stop having nightmares. Those are two very different intentions, and the book that came out of the second one is nothing like what the first would have produced.

I am 72 years old. I have four sons, three marriages behind me, and a childhood I spent most of my adult life not thinking about. After my third wife passed away, the past came back the way it tends to when grief clears out the noise you have been using to keep it at a distance. My counselor told me to write it down. So I did. All of it. As honestly as I could manage.

The result is The Secrets We Must Hold, a three-volume autobiography about eighteen months of my childhood that I had kept secret for sixty-five years. Volume One is out now. And I am asking you to read it, not because it is easy reading, but because I think it is necessary.

Most Books About This Subject Keep You at a Distance

I have read some of the books that exist on this subject. The ones that get published. The ones that win awards and get taught in classrooms and reviewed in the right places. And there is something almost all of them have in common: they are written from a safe distance.

The author has already processed. Already healed, or mostly healed, or found the language of healing. The story is told from the other side of the river.

I understand why. Writing from that distance is survivable. You can look back at what happened without climbing back into it. But something gets lost in that distance too. The reader gets the shape of the experience without the texture of it. They understand what happened without feeling what it was actually like to be inside it.

I wrote my book from the inside. From the perspective of the boy I was at seven, eight, nine years old, who did not have the language for what was happening to him and did not know, not with any certainty, that it was wrong. That choice makes the book harder to write. It also makes it more true.

I wrote it from the inside. From the perspective of a boy who did not yet know it was wrong.

Why This Year Matters

There is something happening right now in the conversation around childhood trauma and survivor testimony that was not happening ten years ago. People are more willing to talk. Survivors are more willing to be named. The cultural permission to say what happened, clearly and without apology, has widened in ways I did not expect to see in my lifetime.

But the books have not fully caught up. The ones that get the most attention are still, largely, the ones that have been cleaned up for general consumption. The messy middle, the confusion, the parts that do not resolve neatly, the experience of being abused by someone you also genuinely loved, those parts are still largely absent from the shelves.

That is what my book puts back in. Not because I wanted to shock anyone. Because leaving those parts out would have been another version of the same silence I kept for sixty-five years. And I am done with silence.

In hopes of helping others understand that they are NOT ALONE, he is writing this book now, 65 years later, and he is finally getting some peace.

The Secrets We Must Hold, Volume One

What You Will Find in This Book

You will find a boy who lost his father at three and spent the years that followed hungry for a kind of attention that no one in his household had to give. You will find the man who noticed that hunger and walked through it like an open door. You will find eighteen months of a childhood told as honestly as a 72-year-old man can tell it after a lifetime of keeping it locked away.

You will also find something I did not expect to put in the book when I started writing it. You will find a child who was, in moments, happy. Who felt chosen and cared for. Who did not experience every day of those eighteen months as purely terrible. That is not a comfortable thing to read. I know, because it was not comfortable to write. But it is true, and the truth of it is exactly what makes the book worth reading for anyone who has ever been confused by their own history.

If your experience was simple, if the person who harmed you was only ever frightening and cold, this book will still speak to you. But if your experience was complicated, if there was warmth and harm in the same hands, if you have spent years not knowing what to do with a memory that refuses to sit still in either category, then this book was written specifically for you.

One More Thing

I want to say something directly to anyone reading this who is carrying their own version of what I carried. The secret. The promise you made too young. The memory that surfaces at the wrong moments and disappears when you try to look at it clearly.

I was 72 when I wrote the first word of this book. Sixty-five years after the thing I was writing about. If you are waiting for the right moment, the right age, the right amount of distance before you let yourself look at it, I want you to know that the right moment does not arrive on its own. You have to decide it is now. I did. And for the first time in sixty-five years, I am getting some peace.

About the Author

Kyle Smith is a survivor, father of four, and first-time author. He began writing The Secrets We Must Hold at the age of 72, following years of counseling after the death of his third wife. The three-volume autobiography is his effort to break a silence that began in childhood and to ensure that others who carry similar experiences know they are not alone.

Content Note

This post discusses themes of childhood sexual abuse and long-term trauma. If you or someone you know needs support, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24 hours a day at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or at rainn.org.