PRESS REVIEWS for Monday Rent Boy
POSTMEDIA/ Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette plus more…
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/vancouver-sun/20240323/282235195654488
“An unflinching exploration of the traumatic legacy of childhood sexual abuse that is rife with anger, but also offers hope of a way forward.” —Toronto Star
Only ONE thing to say comes to mind… it is a Hebrew expression….Kol Hakavod” – It is the phrase for Applause and Recognition meaning “All the Honour” that is meant to touch the heart. I am so happy that your work is getting the appreciation it deserves. WONDERFUL. Rachel Schwartz
https://epaper.montrealgazette.com/article/282329684934753
https://lindaleith.medium.com/the-lot-susan-dohertys-monday-rent-boy-5ed9869619cc
Guest Blog from Bernadette Howell, Vancouver BC
Going to dark places when we prefer to stay in the light
April 10, 2024
Breaking silence. Confronting clergy abuse.
I have no desire to bring anyone to dark places if there isn’t a need.
But there is a need.
Susan Doherty is a Montreal-based author who also agrees that there are times when it is necessary to go to these places. She has just published her third novel on what is a very difficult subject.
Her book is called “Monday Rent Boy” published three weeks ago on March 19, 2024, by Penguin Random House.
This author has courageously chosen to portray the topic of child sexual abuse, highlighting the appalling consequences both for those who have suffered horrendous abuse and also speaking to the far-reaching effects of child abuse across today’s digital universe.
Her story is a tale of two young Catholic altar boys, sexually abused by their priest.
This book is described by Jamie Portman of the Vancouver Sun as a “lacerating new novel about child sexual abuse and its aftermath”.
In her interview with the Vancouver Sun, Susan Doherty shares:
“It’s kind of like a car crash where you do slow your car down, but you don’t always look because you’re too afraid of seeing the mangled faces.”
She then goes on to say, “Yet if you don’t talk about these things, the situation never improves.”
I could not agree more.
As you can imagine, I was naturally keen to read this novel given the review in the Vancouver Sun but also because the author’s comments touched on so many things I believe and have been attempting to address for years, most recently through my blog.
Susan Doherty grew up Catholic.
“Everyone who wore a Roman collar was above us” she shares, describing how this in itself is a “prime principle of clericalism”. And not only a prime principle but a “shattering” one.
She also speaks of how “if we deny human beings their sexuality, it leads to a distorted life” adding her own frustrations with the Catholic Church’s “absolutely hypocritical stance on homosexuality”.
My exact thoughts.
The hypocritical behaviour of many clergy who do one thing in private themselves but who then publicly preach against it is compounded when the Catholic Church then additionally labels homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered”.
What is in fact disordered, a belief that many uphold, is the repression of one’s innate sexuality so as to become a celibate priest for life.
Homosexuality, as with heterosexuality, allows the natural expression of human beings to care for and love one another.
Mandated celibacy, on the other hand, stunts and represses sexual development, demanding that the priest additionally live a life devoid of physical intimacy of any kind.
But back to Susan Doherty’s book...
For those who have suffered sexual abuse as a child, and especially for readers who have suffered clergy abuse, this book may be hard for you to read. You may find many parts triggering and I do wish to forewarn you of this and share this with you up front.
Or, you may perhaps feel validated that this author, and now the wider audience of readership, actually get a glimpse into what you went through as a child, of what you could not talk about then, and perhaps cannot talk about now, things few people will ever understand.
You will need to discern for yourself if this is a book you wish to read...
To others, while you may prefer to veer away from reading about a topic that feels very dark, I invite you to be open to what you can learn, and how sometimes going to these darker places when you prefer to stay in the light is a way of honouring and supporting those who have suffered clergy and childhood sexual abuse. And potentially leading you into taking greater action.
Child sexual abuse is such an horrific reality that I feel like saying we all have a moral duty to read Susan Doherty’s book.
Clergy sexual abuse forms a very large part of this reality. It is interesting that this author chose to specifically write this story based on two Catholic children, altar boys, sexually abused by the priest.
No matter who the perpetrator however, this could be the story of children who live down the block from you…or even next door.
When reading “Monday Rent Boy” I found that each evening, I did not return to pick up where I left off the day before with quite the same gusto that I might with some other more lighthearted form of fiction or storytelling.
But this was only because this subject is so very real. And because, barely two months ago, I sat in court for the first time and heard John Doe speak so bravely of his own molestation and rape. I additionally then also witnessed and observed other men who came forward in their support, sharing their own experiences. Several of them had been abused while in the supposedly coveted role of being privileged young altar boys.
Consequently, not only did I have to continue reading “Monday Rent Boy” each evening, I wanted to.
Susan Doherty writes as though she knows all the ‘ins and outs’ of how predator priests operate.
She evokes the fear. She details the manipulation. She conjures the sinister overtones of the grooming process.
Through her literary style, she introduces us to and helps us to understand the violence of silence and secrecy.
This author comes across as genuinely sensitive. She writes of how both these boys were each coaxed into believing they were being offered a form of love and care. Vulnerable and needing both attention and affection, so often missing due to family and home circumstances, these two boys in Doherty’s story, as in real life, each believed the priest and naturally, fell prey to his manipulation and lure.
This author knows and writes of how “evil people look exactly like the good people” and of how “the predator always knows who is unprotected.”
Her sensitivity continues beyond the terrible wounding that a child endures.
She understands that, in it’s complexity, this wounding carries on through teen years and into adult life.
Susan Doherty uses a phrase in her story that I often hear victim-survivors share – that they are “walking through life pretending to be alive.”
“Monday Rent Boy” essentially starts out as a story of two young boys, bonded through their friendship and their boyish misbehaviours, later to be bonded by their unspoken common secret, that of both being sexually molested and abused by the priest, both believing they were each the 'favoured’ boy. Such is how perpetrators manipulate those they prey upon.
Not unlike the pupils from North Vancouver’s Holy Trinity Parish School who privately called Fr. John Kilty “Guilty Kilty”, the priest in this book, Fr, Dante Ziperto is privately nicknamed “Zipper”.
I personally find it triggering to contemplate this name...
If I am to offer true and honest opinion, I would have to share that I was somewhat disappointed as we came to the end of the book, not knowing if this predatory priest ever received just punishment for his heinous acts. I do not wish to say more nor spoil any reading for others, but as I reflected on this later, perhaps the way in which the author does in fact deal with this priest’s departure from the story is perhaps how it typically is in real life?
I will also say, and with my apologies to the author as titles certainly can be tricky, but I’m not sure I like the title. The term ‘rent boy’, for me, personally conjures up images of post-pubescent boys and younger men being paid for sex.
Ultimately, this is in fact what is happening to these two young altar boys. They are being 'paid' for their submission to sexual acts but acts in which they have no choice. They are being paid for their silence. And for the violence perpetrated on them, whether with gifts or with money.
But what Arthur and Ernie, the two young boys in this story are subjected to is SO much more. It is clergy and child-sexual abuse. Period.
My brother-in-law who lived in the U.K. and where this story is set, was a social worker. He would sometimes speak of his work with young 12-year-old boys lured down to London for prostitution rings. Is this the same as child sexual abuse?
Absolutely it is.
I personally just find the term ‘rent boy’ does not sit well with me. In any context. Not for anyone and not in this story. And most of all, not for young children initially lured by a priest, someone they are taught to be in awe of, who is their designated religious, spiritual and moral leader, and who then molests and abuses them.
But this small detail of title aside, this novel “cuts painfully close to the truth” and is a story that has to be read.
The book is written in alternating first person narratives which add pace and texture and character along with the additional, and most welcome voice later on in the novel of a character who brings hope to the devastation we read about and witness.
Broadly speaking, while it is a story that recounts two individuals' lives, destroyed in childhood, struggling as teens and then as adults, it shows us how resilience comes through – whether that resilience is influenced by good or by evil.
Doherty portrays the reality of evil in ways that will likely shock you but will also help to wake you up, as it did me, to the realities of the world of child sexual abuse, to pornography rings and to the world of the ‘dark web’. She does an amazing job of weaving the interplay of good and evil between the two main characters, Arthur and Ernie, each who are born innocent young children.
Doherty also addresses something I frequently hear from victim-survivors: how ‘shame and blame’ is thrown back at those who are victimized.
At one point, Ernie, as a teen, decides to tell the church warden what has been happening. But he is, of course, not believed.
Ernie comes from a difficult home situation, growing up in a family that has experienced a lot of dysfunctions. Subsequently, he is seen as ‘troublesome’ and berated for what are believed to be 'lies'.
This only heightens the shame and furthers the boys’ silence.
Arthur, upon reflecting on this, expresses that Ernie has “ripped open the stitches” concealing their secret life in the hope of putting a stop to the abusers, but has been “the one blamed instead.”
I have heard of this too many times...
Susan Doherty tackles it all.
The abuse. The challenge to survive. The possibility of hope.
She also tackles (and her knowledge of this blew my mind) the whole topic of the “dark web’, weaving into her story the larger, deeper and wider impact of child sexual abuse on a global level.
In the ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of her book she writes:
“Less known is that unaddressed child sexual abuse has had a huge role to play in the current crisis of child pornography on the internet as well as on the even more insidious darknet, a Pandora’s box where new web browsers – Tor, i2P and FreeNet – and untraceable cryptocurrencies provide near-perfect anonymity for people seeking depraved acts of sexual violence.”
She finishes off by adding:
“One final thought: imagine if an influential institution like the Catholic Church – with more than 1.3 billion members – had put a stop to child sex crimes in the years and decades before the internet. Might the current crisis of online predation and pornography of minors have been mitigated?”
This is a powerful reminder of how we, society at large, and to include so many Catholics still turning a blind eye, have allowed a very powerful institution, the Catholic Church, to contribute to the crisis of online predation and the pornography of minors.
One last comment....
Susan Doherty speaks in her ‘Authors Note’ of the U.K. entertainer and pedophile, Jimmy Savile who abused upward of 1,000 children over the course of 50 years, a fact that came to light after his death in 2011 (see Netflix “Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story” 2022)
In speaking of this, Doherty questions the societal mindset that was in place to allow such rampant behaviours to go unchecked for half a century.
To this I add the following:
We too must question: what is the state of our current societal mindset that, in this present day and age, we stand by and watch the Catholic Church, the largest non-profit organization in the world, allow such rampant behaviours to go unchecked?
Thank you for reading – and thank you to Susan Doherty for her courage in writing this novel.
Bernadette
Press Reviews for The Ghost Garden
The Toronto Sun written by Liz Braun
Ottawa Review of Books, February 2, 2109 article written by Ian Thomas Shaw
The Globe and Mail article written by Wency Leung
Maclean’s Magazine article written by Brian Bethune for June, 2019
Montreal Review of Books written by Claire Holden Rothman
The Current on air Anna Maria Tremonti
CTV National Your Morning
Global National on TV with Jeff McArthur and Carolyn Mackenzie
CTV Montreal on TV with Mutsumi Takahashi
TVO with Nam Kiwanuka ~ Segment aired on August 1, 2019
Georgia Straight, BC written by Brian Lynch
Quill and Quire written by Anne Thériault
Literary Review of Canada by Leanne Toshiko Simpson
https://player.talkradioeurope.com/ondemand/Talk_Radio_Europe_in_Spain_2020-09-03_14-00-00.mp3
Presse pour Le jardins des fantômes
L’actualité par Marie-Hélène Proulx
Site Boomers par André Maccabée
https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2019/11/30/lenfer-de-la-schizophrenie
BOOK JACKET BLURBS
“Susan Doherty achieves a luminous, fierce and loving portrait of our brothers and sisters who suffer in ways that can appear bewildering and frightening; that can deplete the compassion even of those who love them most; ways in which the abiding human need for connection is obscured by personal chaos. The Ghost Garden is a signal and compelling act of connection. Leavened with humour, clear-eyed yet packed with hope, in this book, Doherty invites us to be part of that connection.”
“With her brave and generous reporting from the front lines of intense human suffering, Susan Doherty delivers a fundamental challenge to everyone inside and outside the mental health system: what do we owe people who have lost their minds? Her poignant and harrowing profiles of men and women diagnosed with schizophrenia make a compelling case for the transformative power of personal compassion and tenacity.”
“This compassionate, perceptive and absorbing book chronicles the lives of people who have not let themselves be entirely crushed by the random cruelty of what used to be called insanity. Since more than 1 in 4 people is touched by mental illness personally or in their families, I recommend this readable, valuable book to everyone.”
“This is a book I wish I could have written. Susan Doherty’s eyes, ears and heart show us professionals who our patients really are and what their lives are really like. We should all see the person before the diagnosis.”
“I have been in and out of the system and been prescribed 24 types of meds for 12 years. I’m 30. It’s about time a book came out that showed the mentally ill the way we actually are... as sentient and competent as everyone else, though we might appear to be different. I loved reading the stories of unfairly marginalized people some of whom I know personally. This is the start of greater acceptance.”
“As a neuroscientist who understands the brain and it’s disorders, I still share the unconscious negative bias towards patients with schizophrenia. Yet in the startling detail of these stories about lives lost, Doherty reveals the enduring humanity that resides within the souls of all persons suffering from this dreadful disease. She has finally given a voice to those unfortunate human beings that has long been unheard.........”
“Being able to reach out to people with a severe mental disorder without the self-protective measures that come with being a mental health”professional” is an uncommon gift. Susan Doherty has it, obviously. Her account of her relationships with people with severe mental illness will bring you very close to them, and safely so. Reading her book might even make you a better person.”