A History of a Pedophile's Wife

Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer

By: Eleanor Cowan

Narrated by: Eleanor Cowan

“How could a mother not know?” This is a question often asked about families where incest has occurred, and Eleanor Cowan’s gripping memoir, A History of a Pedophile’s Wife, steps up with answers that are courageous and heartbreaking. Cowan grew up in Quebec in the 1950s, in a large Roman Catholic family with a lethal mix of violence, addiction, and toxic pedagogy. Cowan details the dance of a survivor moving into adulthood: one step forward towards freedom, two steps back into conditioning, until a tipping point of consciousness is reached. As her memoir makes clear, that tipping point is not just a critical mass of abuse or even a touchstone of personal growth. It requires an enlarged and feminist context, permission to know the unknowable, and language to name the unspeakable.

Cowan’s audiobook is a primer in compassion, especially for those of us who were abused as children and left to struggle with legacies of distrust and rage towards our mothers. It’s a vivid indictment of a mother-blaming culture that protects the very institutions that perpetuate child abuse.

©2013 Eleanor Cowan (P)2022 Eleanor Cowan

A journey into awareness

A powerful telling of a journey through violence and indoctrination, into healing, empowerment, and awareness. Cowan shows that facing reality, however harsh, is far better and more empowering than remaining in denial, and vulnerable to repeated harm to self and others.