When we first met Kristin Louise Duncombe, she was an American life coach who had moved to Paris from Kenya. She had just penned her first memoir, Trailing, which resonated with many women who have left their safe world and family to follow their partners to a new country. Her second memoir, Five Flights Up, was about uprooting family again, this time from Paris to Lyon. Now, OBJECT is Duncombe’s most searing book to date, a memoir that explores childhood traumas that haunt and shape us into adulthood.
With this new book, Kristin Louise Duncombe reaches into her past to idyllic days she spent with her best friend on the Ivory Coast as children of the privileged US diplomatic community. Inseparable. Innocent. Until the 10-year-old Duncombe is sexually groomed over time by her best friend’s father, an esteemed member of the American diplomatic corp. Even when the scandal exploded into the open, with the revelation of other young girls sexually abused by the man, the State Department stifled the affair and embarked on a major cover-up.
Enter our giveaway to win a copy Object, published by Transformation Press (2024)!
INSPIRELLE reached out to this prolific author who has returned to Paris with her son to write and work as a couples and life coach for international and expatriate individuals and families. Duncombe shares with our readers why she underwent the cathartic journey to tell her story.
Object is your very personal story about childhood sexual abuse. How did you know it was time to write about it?
I had actually written this story a couple of times, in different forms, over the years. The first time was as a fictionalized short story in college (which I refer to in the book). The second time I attempted to write about it was in my first memoir, Trailing. The agent I was working with at that time, however, talked me out of including anything about my abuse history.
He claimed that “no one wanted to read another story about being groped.” Though what happened to me as a child went well beyond being “groped,” his dismissal went straight to that part of me that had always believed that my story was not important. That was in 2010.
In 2020, I finally sat down and started writing. There are really two main reasons I was ready and serious about it this time. The first is that I had left my marriage, which opened up the space for me to reflect candidly on how and why I ended up in that marriage to begin with.
The second reason is that the year I left my marriage (2016) is the year that “pussy-grabber” Trump became president, and the Larry Nasser story broke. Larry Nasser was the doctor for the US women’s gymnastics team, and he sexually abused hundreds of young women. He had been reported! But, like what happened to me back in the early 1980s, the institution he worked for protected him, not the girls he was abusing. When I learned this, fury took over, and with nothing stopping me anymore from describing honestly the many problematic relationships I’d had in my life with men – including the one I married – the time had come to tell the story.
Did you struggle to get down your emotions and experiences or did the writing come easily?
The book wrote itself, completely. But as I talk about in the book, which is also the story of telling the story, I wrote the first draft entirely in the second person. Meaning, instead of saying, “My marriage ended when I was forty-seven years old. I didn’t see it coming.” I wrote, “Your marriage ends when you are forty-seven years old. You didn’t see it coming.” This is not such an uncommon manner of oral expression; using the second-person voice to talk about yourself is a way of distancing, or dissociating, from the story. I found that distance an extremely fluid way to recount everything that had happened to me as a kid and in the years that followed the trauma. From a literary standpoint, I found the “you” voice very compelling.
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, is written in second-person, as is An Italian Affair, by Laura Fraser, which is another memoir that I really loved. However, the first editor who read Object insisted that this way of narrating a story is too atypical and that I would not attract a wide enough readership if I did not put it in the first person. The most important thing for me was that Object be widely read; to this day, I am shocked and dismayed and very angry that a child rapist was allowed to carry on with impunity, with the blessing of his employer, the US government.
I NEED people to know about this, and so I rewrote the book to make it more accessible. Because the story is about telling a story, I discuss the switch from the first to the second-person voice in the text and narrate brief passages in the second person to showcase some of that dissociation. The prologue, for example, begins with: “You are twelve years old; it is dusk on a weekday evening, and your parents are drinking gin and tonics in the living room…”
Girls and women can find themselves in undesirable situations. Why do they feel guilt and shame when it’s not of their making?
Because we live in a culture of victim blaming and because girls are taught to be pleasers. I am speaking in generalizations; it’s important to acknowledge that not every girl becomes a pleaser, but if you look at sociological norms and patterns, females are “groomed” to accommodate. This is changing, but change is slow, and it is hard to undo years of social conditioning. I feel able to state this so confidently because, as a therapist who works with many women of different ages, one of the common themes in our sessions – no matter the age of the woman – is learning how to say what she wants and learning how to stop shape-shifting to be what others expect of her.
There is a scene in my book where I cancel a second date with a man that I had sex with because I was too afraid to say no. I was afraid that if I said no, he would just force me, so I played along, suffering inside while the act was happening. Afterwards, he was all excited about me and the prospect of spending more time together, such that even though my skin was crawling and I never wanted to see him again, I felt anxious and guilty for disappointing him. Our short-lived dynamic had been built around me pretending I was OK with what he wanted and then feeling guilty for being a disappointment. Why? Because that propensity to accommodate runs so deep, not doing so feels like failing.
Is it not a double betrayal when the authorities don’t support you?
Of course, and it compounds the trauma. One of the most poignant things that has happened since I released Object is the outpouring of messages I have gotten from men and women who were victims of the same man who abused me, men and women who are younger than me and who, had the State Department prosecuted this man, would have been saved from victimization.
There are so many examples of institutional collusion; the one that really triggered me into writing my book, as I mentioned above, was the Larry Nasser/USA gymnastics scandal. Gymnast Amanda Thomashow and others had reported Larry Nasser, but the reports were buried, allowing him to continue to abuse hundreds more girls. Other horrific examples of institutional collusion are detailed in Lacy Crawford’s Notes On A Silencing and Vanessa Springora’s Consent, which takes place here in Paris and will really make your blood boil.
How important is it to talk to someone if you have been sexually abused?
It is so important…but recovering from complex trauma is a very tricky process. Any type of trauma needs treatment, but unlike acute trauma (say, for example, if you are assaulted by a stranger while walking down the street), ongoing sexual abuse at the hands of a “trusted” friend or family member creates a developmental wound that is much more difficult to address, because it is harder to articulate. I’ll illustrate what I mean with this example: if you are assaulted by a stranger on the street, you KNOW what you need to process (“I was thinking about my grocery list when all of sudden he jumped on top of me and started punching. It all happened so fast and I could hear people around me shouting and I went into fight mode and started kicking and screaming.”)
Clearly, there would be a lot to unpack and recover from in this type of scenario, but it has a clearly defined storyline with a clear start and end point. In the story I tell in Object, the storyline is all very blurry, therefore the psychological impact is as well. A ten-year-old girl is groomed, over time, by her best friend’s father, with horseplay, gifts, teasing and laughter, fun…something that feels a lot like love. When the molestation begins, it isn’t violent. It is gentle, and quiet, and crazy-making.
Is this really happening? What does it mean? Because he is so nice…he couldn’t be bad, could he?
And so begins the psychological impact of this sort of violence. Doubting self. Suppressing instinct. Self-blame. Minimization. Accommodation. The list goes on. And when these elements become a “normal” way of functioning in the world, you don’t even realize what is wrong.
Do you think the #MeToo movement encouraged you to write your story?
Absolutely. There is a scene in my book where I write, “The top story that day was more #MeToo fodder: Donald Trump and his nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, both accused of sexual assault. My mind roamed to other recent high-profile stories: Dominique Strauss Kahn and his ‘aggravated-pimping’ at the Carlton Hotel. The Stanford University swimmer-rapist, Brock Turner, appealing his conviction. Larry Nasser. Harvey Weinstein. Jeffrey Epstein. And then there was William Mulcahy, whose story had been buried, paving the way for him to assault God only knows how many girls after Abidjan. Mulcahy. Mulcahy. Mulcahy. Mr. Mulcahy was all those men; and they, he: men who saw girls and women as objects, to be used for their own purposes. It was painful and enraging, the misogyny that blanketed society. And it was so difficult to decode, because not all men are abusers. But of all the abusers that exist, the large majority are men.”
OBJECT is now available for purchase in print and ebook!
Kristin, you have lived all over the world, why settle in Paris?
Yes, I have really lived all over the world! I was born in DC and then lived in Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, India, Indonesia, three places in the USA (Massachusetts, Seattle, and New Orleans), Kenya, Uganda, France, and Switzerland. I have settled in Paris because this is where I made a stable base for myself when I was a young mother, as detailed in my book, Trailing. I lived here for ten years until my (now ex) husband convinced me to follow him again on his career path. We spent four years in Lyon (as detailed in my book Five Flights Up) and then moved to Geneva for eight years.
READ an exclusive excerpt of Kristin Louise Duncombe’s second book, Five Flights Up
I am “good” at moving; I know how to land on my feet. But I own a little 58-square-meter apartment in the 11th arrondissement, and I was always just waiting for the right moment to come back. My youngest child turned eighteen in 2023, and he said, “Mom, let’s go home.” That was all I needed to start packing! Paris is where I am most comfortable; it is home.
