Torn Butterfly: A Novel of Obsession

The story of Jordan Kincaid is a heart-wrenching, thinly-veiled story of a woman's lifelong fight for emotional and physical survival against acts of abandonment, abuse, and neglect. Jordan narrates her life, first as a little girl, age eight, funny, precocious, and ferociously entertaining, transcribing her hellish world in Southern California in the Sixties as Mt. Olympus upended, peopled with a family of mythically tragic dysfunctional proportions living on a tight wire where lower class suburban survival can explode in a nanosecond from the constant fear of a descent into perpetual poverty, to the reality of a caregiver turned ravager and the crushing agony endured as an eight year old raped. Forbidden to ever speak of it, food becomes solace for silence, a metaphor for emotional nourishment so heartlessly denied by a host of caregivers who do not care at all. Jordan chronicles her climb out of darkness, blossoming into a young beauty with a surprisingly beautiful self-made future in business. She falls hard for a monolithic iconic powerful man, a quintessential pretend prince who sweeps her off to the glittering French Riviera. In crackling energetic raw rugged prose, she recounts the devastating twist turn from fairy tale to nightmare where a villa becomes a prison, plunging her into an abysmal battle for her life. The woman, once silenced as a child, is brutally silenced again, isolated and alone, always alone, at a table for two and at a table for ten. Her lifelong hunger for love, respect, and safety drive her to the bottle and the plate, with thirsts and appetites that can never be sated at any table. From girl to grown up, forked and spooned, Jordan remains starved in countless ways, the prize of predators who think a heart and soul are something to eat. Against all odds, Jordan sets out to build a new life where home is a safe haven of love, honesty, and expression beyond the measure or anchor of ceilings, doorways, and walls. Crackling with anger, iconic intellect, sorrow, and the pulse point of a thriller, Jordan's tale of survival, self-discovery, and unconditional love will ravage every reader's heart.