`Did I ever hurt you when you were a child?'

IT IS A LITTLE disconcerting and somewhat chilling to read reviews of my recently published memoir and see my own words quoted back to me. It is not because I don't like what I wrote, or feel shame about it. It is because I was the holder of so many family secrets, and the injunction to silence was so strong. In writing my story, I broke all of the family rules.

Growing up, I held tight to the illusion that everything would by OK if I too could project the image of the perfect family, even though my inner life was so fraught with tension. In seeing recent reviews of my book, although favorable, sometimes the child part of my mind shrinks in horror: \o7"What have you done?"\f7 And then the calm, adult part of my mind says: \o7"You have told the truth to the best of your ability."\f7 Any of us who has experienced childhood sexual abuse or other forms of abuse, even as adults, knows something of these conflicted feelings.

My parents, Fay and Herbert Aptheker, were members of the U.S. Communist Party. My mother was a union organizer, and my father was often described in the New York Times as the party's "leading theoretician," as if it were an appendage to his name. He was also a radical historian and the literary executor of the papers of W.E.B. DuBois. He published extensively and was an exceedingly controversial figure in the historical profession, and his Communist affiliation assured that he was blacklisted from any university work, beginning in the 1930s.

I grew up in the 1950s striving to be the "perfect daughter" as my embattled parents bravely stood up to the McCarthy hearings, anti-Communist purges and trials and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In childhood, I assumed that I would inherit my father's dream and further his ambition. This was my parents' expectation. As I matured, I gave up those particular dreams and ambitions, but I did not give up my mother and my father, even after the memories of sexual abuse arose. As I wrote in the memoir, "I sought a middle ground between the grief of an irreconcilable break and the long shadow of denial."

It was when I began writing the memoir in the mid-1990s, and especially its childhood section, that I had my first memories of sexual abuse by my father, which I had entirely suppressed until then. I was mucking around in my childhood because my daughter and my partner, reading early drafts, kept saying that the narrative was emotionally flat. "Where are you?" they wanted to know. "What were you feeling?" I was the narrator, but the story read as though I was floating around on the ceiling of my childhood, watching it unfold.