Cut Me Loose - By Leah Vincent. Anyone read it? Thoughts?

shnitzel

Thu, Mar 06 2014, 11:25 am

The book was very artfully written. She purposefully juxtaposed things from her childhood that paralleled things that happened when she was older to imply causation. It was also a very short book and she really breezed over how she got from point A to point B. It is very obvious there is more to the story.

I don't think we can look at a child and make assumptions about the parents. The quote from Leah's father at the end is very telling.

The poster I quoted before did say to toss out everything Leah said as unbelievable because crazy. "By talking about her as though she was normal.....her instability and inability to conform are the problem" doesn't that quote make you feel sick. That isn't the same as what isramom8 said. It is very different.

marina

Sun, Mar 16 2014, 1:35 pm

I finally read the book. She explains the money /support question and answers many others. The book flows well.

Towards the end she describes an incident where her older sister was getting married, and the parents did not want Leah to attend the wedding, but instead invited her to a family dinner shortly before the wedding. When Leah came, her sister, the kallah, told her that her mother asked if she could please not touch any of her siblings and eat only off of paper plates because the mother is concerned because Leah "sleeps with men" and everyone might catch a disease from her, if she touches her siblings or eats off of real plates.

If the above really happened, if a mother said such a thing to her own daughter, this parent deserves everything that came upon her as a result of this book being published. Everything. And more.

amother

Thu, May 15 2014, 1:51 pm

marina wrote:

I do think that some STD's can be transmitted through saliva, or any other bodily fluid, maybe even sweat?

The mother probably knew about her daughter's STD from when she was in the hospital- since she was a minor, they called the mother to get her admitted, and it's possible they told her the diagnosis afterwards, so she realized that her daughter got an STD, and could have gotten other STD's since then. (Of course it's terrible that the mother did not allow her daughter to get emergency care. When she said she had stomach aches, maybe the mother thought she was pregnant, and when she said she needed a procedure done, perhaps the mother thought she was planning an abortion).

The mother could have had a legitimate concern about another STD being transmitted through saliva on the food, plates, cutlery, and transmission of an STD through saliva from kissing siblings- after all, brothers and sisters sometimes hug and kiss if they haven't seen each other in a while.

An STD could be transmitted through blood from an open cut. She could cut herself, a sister might help her wipe off the blood and catch the disease.

I can understand why Leah was very hurt- I would also have been very hurt in that situation, but I could also see why the mother may have been concerned.

miami85

Thu, May 15 2014, 3:27 pm

marina wrote:

That's rather harsh considering that you don't know the family. I don't know what happened in this incident, but I know the family and they are very special people. I've spent a lot of time with her mother and I don't know how to comprehend this incident.

PinkFridge

Thu, May 15 2014, 6:49 pm

I don't know what to say. I don't think that there's any point to this becoming a "she says" "but the family is so incredible" thing. There are so very many gaps to the story. And yes, it is her story to tell, but it's ours to interpret. It's obvious that there were some serious mental health things going on, and a lot we don't know about in her journey to the healthier in many ways place she's at now. Personally, she kind of lost me with the line early on about Jewish songs being dirges, about killing the non-Jews and paradise, or something like that. And the line later about

Hidden:

And oh yeah, that awful affair with the married professor that she doesn't seem to take any responsibility for.

Edited because I see it changed the "g" word to non-Jews but didn't capitalize the J.

marina

Sun, May 18 2014, 1:34 pm

amother wrote:

Siblings don't exchange saliva when they kiss. STDs are transmitted through s-ex not through wiping a cut from your sister. Please learn about STDs and how they are transmitted.

And it makes no difference anyway, a mother doesn't do that to her kid. Even if your child has HIV and is on her deathbed coughing up blood, you hug her and hold her in your arms and watch her die.

Last edited by marina on Sun, May 18 2014, 1:37 pm; edited 1 time in total

marina

Sun, May 18 2014, 1:36 pm

miami85 wrote:

I said- if it happened. And I bolded it and underlined it. I take what she writes with a grain of salt, but she is generally well-respected (unlike feldman) and I tend towards believing her.

If it happened, I don't care how special they are to you. They are horrible parents. When you see a mom beating her child at the grocery store, do you judge her? Or do you think: mmmm... maybe she's a very special person, I don't really know her family.

Last edited by marina on Sun, May 18 2014, 1:40 pm; edited 1 time in total

marina

Sun, May 18 2014, 1:40 pm

PinkFridge wrote:

Hidden:

And oh yeah, that awful affair with the married professor that she doesn't seem to take any responsibility for.

Edited because I see it changed the "g" word to non-Jews but didn't capitalize the J.

1. There are chabad niggunim that are dirges and essentially talk about how all the gentiles will be gone soon.

2. she did a very bad job of taking responsibility for her actions in this book. My teen daughter read it and said: this is not a book about a person who went OTD. It's just a book about a girl who makes bad choices and tries to blame it on her parents.

That said, I stand by what I wrote. If her mother did that, she is a horrible parent.

ronbonboo

Sun, May 18 2014, 4:01 pm

She was hospitalized for mental illness, and didn't follow through with treatment. She then says I was told if I went off the derech is be a harlot so I was just living out what was supposed to happen.

C'mon I'm so sick of girls going off the derech and writing books trashing the different denominations of Judaism. Okay she had effed up parents but 1 father doesn't acct for the entire nation. And on a side note if her upbringing was so bad why was she the only one to go off the derech? (Her brother never fully went off)

debsey

Mon, May 26 2014, 12:39 pm

marina wrote:

Also, one of the first reviews in that link criticizes this book goes off on how her statement that " I know that there is no single truth. We can only convey the raw and awkward shape of reality as we each experience it, " is some kind of acknowledgement that she's lying.

But her statement is completely true and is the basis for many therapies addressing complex relationships. People have different realities and there's not one right version of the events. You can see this in interactions between spouses, friends, and of course, parents and children.

To me, that quote shows insight and honesty, not the opposite.

Marina-
I like what you are saying in the sense that I DO believe reality is experienced by different people in different ways. However, there is also the concept of responsibility in our speech.

For example (and this is NOT what Leah Vincent did, I'm just using an extreme) If you say "My father raped me" and what you MEAN by that is "He treated me in such a degrading and objectifying way, it FELT like a rape" that is IRRESPONSIBLE speech. Most people take the term "rape" to mean...well, rape.

Some of Leah Vincent's rewriting of reality (however her life SUBJECTIVELY felt) feels irresponsible, at least to this reader.

If you were NOT chassidish, don't describe your life as being what we'd all recognize as more typically Chassidishe. If you had WAY more educational opportunities than the typical Bais Rochel girl in Williamsburg, then DON'T make your education sound like you grew up in such a sheltered community. Those are different memories. Not yours. Maybe your friends'. But not yours.

I say this as a Bais Yakov girl who grew up, went to college, and got a graduate degree from an Ivy League institution. My Bais Yakov of Boro Park education prepared me for college JUST fine. I don't think I could have said the same had I grown up in a more sheltered community. (No offense to anyone who DID grow up in a more sheltered community....)But if I WANTED to spin my education as having been very stereotypical and restrictive, I COULD have.....But it would be irresponsible, because I would be shading the truth.

Leah's truth is shaded, not because of the hermeneutics of memory or the social construction of a particular type of female gender role in yeshivishe circles, but because she is actively managing her image. In doing so, she loses credibility.
debs

Vashti Hamalka

Mon, May 26 2014, 2:47 pm

marina wrote:

I think some beis yaakovs prepare their graduates well for college and some are abysmal. I'm not sure why you think Leah's school certainly prepared her well. Because she ultimately went to a good school? That's not really relevant, is it? I'm sure some beis rochel or ohalei torah graduates could sail into Harvard as well just based on their natural intelligence

Except that a Satmar/bais ruchel diploma is not accredited so the girls must get a GED whereas every bais yaakov is accredited making it easier for bais yaakov girls to go to college.

Leahs school certainly prepared her well or she would not have gotten a presidential scholarship from Brooklyn College for her undergraduate degree.

esther09

Tue, Jun 17 2014, 3:59 am

marina wrote:

Just read the book and decided to read this thread. The bolded is EXACTLY what I said about the book.

What baffles me the most about this book is what others have said: an OOT yeshivish community is not THAT insulated. It's tough for me to feel sympathy for her in terms of religion and her childhood in Pittsburgh. She went to school with Modern Orthodox girls.... I just don't get how she can claim to have been so insulated/cut off from the world.

What this book is really about is poor parenting. And, really, really bad life choices that may have been caused by psychological trauma inflicted by poor parenting, but ultimately are the responsibility of an adult, who makes bad choices.

BlueRose52

Sun, Nov 30 2014, 12:26 pm

Finally made time to get through the book. Honestly, didn't think it was really that great a read, but it was ok, and held my interest to the end. Regarding the various questions and points made in this thread (which I just reread), here's my thoughts:

Firstly, I don't think that the criticisms she aims are directed primarily at the frum world, more at her family for being so seemingly cold and indifferent when she was struggling so badly.

Also, in the book it didn't seem that her family kicked her out and cut her off when she got back to NYC. It seemed that she was sent to Brooklyn in an arrangement that was routine in her family. This is notably different from how she describes it in the Katie Couric interview, where it sounds way worse. That doesn't lessen how difficult it might have been for her, but it definitely does lessen some of the criticism of her parents of that incident. Here's the pages where she describes that period:

Hidden:

The book explains that she was sent to England because she was starting to show some signs of "trouble", such as expressing disagreement over her father's views, and other such unconventional expressions of independence. In her own words, "Concerned about the corrupting influence of my classmates in Pittsburgh, my parents decided that I would leave Pennsylvania a year earlier than we had originally planned.... I would move in with my Aunt Fraidy in Manchester, where I would attend the stringent local Bais Yakov high school. And then I'd be back on course."

What I found most surprising about the whole book was that through so much of the early years of her rebellion, even when she was having sеx with non-Jews, she still thought of herself as frum! She didn't see herself as leaving, as having gone off the derech; she hadn't, in her mind, slammed the door to her old world. On the contrary, she desperately wanted someone from that world to reach out to her and give her the love she missed. If someone had cared about her and accepted her in the way she needed, she may very well never had gone through through such a painful and destructive journey.

Also, there were so many very typical overreactions by her family. Overreaction to her wanting to go to college, to her buying a less than modest sweater, to her writing letters to a boy, to her expressing her independence, it's so sad to see things like that. Thankfully, the frum world is very slowly learning how to better handle things like that, but the truth is, we all know these reactions are still common among many frum people (they're sometimes even expressed on this forum), and that part of her story should be a bit of a cautionary tale to those who are faced with such "rebellious" behaviors.

Overall, a really tragic tale, IMHO.