Redeemed

March 1, 2024
In this memoir, Lane revisits the twisting road she traveled to self-affirmation after suffering an abusive upbringing. On a fateful day in 1963, 4-year-old Penny Lane was sitting happily on her tricycle, surveying her suburban New Jersey neighborhood, when a strange man walked up her driveway and began hugging her. Her Aunt Charlotte immediately appeared and began talking to the man; as Lane was to learn, the stranger was her biological father, a Hungarian immigrant who had come to retrieve his daughter and "take [her] home." (Until that moment, she had thought that Aunt Charlotte was her mother.) Within hours, Lane was on a California-bound airplane, headed to Desert Hot Springs and a small, flat-roofed house, where an angry woman, speaking in a foreign language, greeted Lane's father. After several days, the girl figured out that this woman was her stepmother. She would not see Aunt Charlotte again for more than 50 years. In 1965, things changed again: The family, which now included Lane's half brother, Steven, moved to a small apartment in the Bronx in New York City. Lane's "space" was the hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom, where she slept on a small cot. Treated as an outsider in the family, she was constantly derided, criticized, and beaten black and blue by her stepmother. In heartbreaking detail that will leave readers gasping, the author describes a childhood and adolescence filled with abuse that crushed her self-confidence and that her father did nothing to curtail. Lane desperately searched for love and family, resulting in an early, disastrous marriage to a man who pulled her into an evangelical Christian church that almost broke her spirit. Articulate, emotional prose brings readers into the author's struggle to reclaim her inner strength and begin a new life ("I felt a power...a strength in my physical being. My soul shifted. I would never stand down to him, or anyone, ever again"). Her intimate portraits of behind-the-scenes radical evangelical offshoots add disturbing, informative details to this personal story. A distressing but engaging chronicle of childhood trauma.

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