In this moving, literate memoir, Dr Elisabeth Hanscombe retraces and reflects on her experiences as a witness to and victim of sexual abuse by her father
In a vivid but always objective narrative, Elisabeth shows how this trauma affects the personality, personal relationships and working life of its victims, but her story is one of perseverance and ultimately transcendence, giving hope to those who have suffered abuse.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
This book is a remarkable testimony to the power of self-transformation — through life, through study, through therapy, through writing. No longer needing to disappear, she is triumphantly present in these pages.
– Christina Houen
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Your book is so well written, and there is such a beautiful spirit that brings light and grace to its darkest places, that I am convinced it will have a long and fruitful life. I am well into it now, and I relish it in all its simple, straightforward, clear-eyed eloquence. The story is so well told. Be well. When you think about it, each day is a coming out, an invitation to blossom and grow. And, like all of your children, your book has and will have a life of its own. Let it surprise you.
– William Michaelian
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
This memoir is intricately observed and written with such clear-eyed intelligence I wanted to swoop down and steal its subject to love and safety. A disturbing and compelling read.  
– Carrie Tiffany
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Lis Hanscombe’s The Art of Disappearing, is a brave, unflinching memoir of surviving a childhood navigating around a violent and abusive father, whose brooding menace lurks on every page. Psychologically astute, Hanscombe is possessed of an unusually vivid and faithful memory to the terrors of childhood. She has the courage to face and penetrate the dark secrets at the centre of her family. A beautifully written, unforgettable account of what it is to grow up in the shadow of alcoholism and sexual predation.
– Anne Manne
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
With a combination of literary ability and deep self-knowledge, ÂElisabeth Hanscombe gives a rare insight into a child’s struggle to survive a physically and sexually abusive family.
– Dr Paul Valent
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
From beginning to end, I was riveted by The Art of Disappearing.
In a seemingly simple chronological account of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, Elisabeth Hanscombe has achieved a complex portrait of herself as narrator, of her individual family members (especially her parents) and of
a family blighted by abuse of several kinds, including the most serious, and of their individual and collective attempts to deal with it.
I was horrified at times, at others moved to tears. The theme of trying to disappear ties together the psychological, physical and emotional challenges and the narrator’s ways of meeting them.
The perspective of one member of a troubled family makes for interesting reading, with the horrendous abuse of Hannah, for example, sometimes brought into focus, through the lens of a sister’s experience of witnessing it and fearing for her own safety.
Then the focus shifts because this is not Hannah’s story, and Elisabeth’s attempts to avoid the predatory father become the most poignant aspect of the story.
The description of a Catholic childhood, with the hint of the predatory behaviour of priests, rang so true for me, it even brought back memories of my own childhood with details I’d forgotten, even ones such as the names of the decades of the rosary!
Throughout I was struck by the force of recognition of life with an abusive alcoholic father and a mother mostly incapable of facing the reality and escaping it and unable to protect her children, to the extent of not seeming to make enough effort (even while I understood the complexity of her situation and the effects on her of violence which damages so severely, and not only physically).
At times the narrrator might have been describing my own experience, always ambivalent about the only home I had, dreading going there, hiding in a bedroom, full of terror, being outside sometimes all night. Walking past the lounge room trying not to attract the attention of a drunk father. Hiding in the toilet to read and disassociate. Being ashamed at school of the poverty, never having enough underclothes, or wearing worn-out uniforms. Trying to comfort and protect a little brother.
I could go on.
But the overriding effect in the end is of transcendence, in the narrator’s focus on her goal and efforts to achieve it, her choice of career, to make something positive out of such negative experience.
But most of all is Elisabeth Hanscombe’s achievement in writing such an honest and courageous and clear-eyed account of this part of her life.
Tillie Olsen, American author once wrote ‘We who write are the survivors’. But by the end of book Elisabeth Hanscombe is not only a survivor, but someone whose suffering has transformed both her own life and potentially so far the lives of others.
I hope this book will be widely read, it deserves to be.
Its very personal account resonates with universal themes, and those of domestic and priestly violence and violation make it particularly important right now.
– Catherine Johns