My memoir Abductions From My Beautiful Life was published on 30.4.2021
It is widely available online including on Amazon, Fishpond, Booktopia, Waterstones UK, and Barnes and Noble.
If you live in Brisbane, it is also available to buy at the arts hub at @rubyredjewellery at 107 Romea St, The Gap 4061, and at the Belmont Private Hospital reception (1220 Creek Rd, Carina Heights, QLD 4152).
You can also borrow a copy from the Brisbane City Council Library catalogue.
And here’s an excerpt:
Prologue
Six days after my daughter’s birth, I was kidnapped. My captors sidled up next to me in a big black car with tinted windows and offered me superpowers instead of sweets. They tricked me with promises. They said, ‘Come with us – and the world and your life will make sense like never before.’ They were right. For twelve hours, before I got in their car, they tempted me with what it felt like to be all knowing and all seeing. I could see everyone else muddling along and then me – soaring high above it all, euphoric in the knowledge I would never be plagued with doubt about anything again – because I knew the reason for everything. Meaningless overheard snippets of other people’s conversations ballooned in significance. They were clues to a giant puzzle, and I was slotting the pieces into place quicker and quicker as the day went on. I laughed and laughed because I saw the world so clearly. Its complexity dazzled me, and I felt omnipotent because I had been handed the ability to solve it. I felt so lucky. I had been given the opportunity to spend a day running the universe – doing work experience with a God I’d never believed in.
They said if I went with them, I’d never need sleep again. I had hardly slept for a week and gave in to temptation. I followed them innocently into their black, smoky car. It was only after I got in and the doors slammed shut that I realised I was trapped in the dark with all the things I feared most in life. They sat so close to me I could feel their breath on my closed eyelids. I turned into a claustrophobic who had been locked in a cupboard. The car sped away. By the time I saw my husband again, I had been tortured into saying unspeakable things. My captors lived inside my head. Their ransom was me. They told me if I didn’t comply, my husband would be tortured just like I had been. They made me look deeply into his eyes and say I didn’t recognise him.
They made me say, ‘I don’t have a baby.’
It took a SWAT team to get me back, gun down the impostors in my head and carry what was left of me to safety, and back to my family.
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