MA Abused

Novelist Martin Amis says he was sexually abused

(An excerpt from a 12 February 1998 Reuters News Service article):

LONDON (February 12, 1998 ) - British novelist Martin Amis has told how writing about a cousin murdered by a serial killer sparked memories of being sexually abused by strangers as a child.

The author of Money, London Fields and Night Train told an American Internet magazine that he had been writing about his cousin who disappeared in 1973, when she was 21. Student Lucy Partington was one of at least 12 young women who were sexually abused and murdered by British serial killers Fred and Rose West. Amis dedicated his 1995 novel The Information to her.

“We didn’t know what had happened to her. Then in 1995, 22 years later she was dug up in a garden of the mass murderer Fred West,” Amis told Salon magazine in an interview published this week.

He added: “I realized that that had been knocking around in my unconscious, and so I was writing about her and Fred West.

“I also found that I was writing about three occasions in my life where I was molested as a child by strangers.

“Once by a couple. There was a party going on at the house. I was 9 years old in my bedroom. He said he was a doctor. She just stood at the door. That sort of thing gets you going off into strange areas,” said Amis, 48. He did not give details of what happened, except to say that the other two occasions when he had been molested had been on the street and on a beach. He had, he said, felt “so trusting.”

© 1998 Reuters News Service

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