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Dancing
with the Octopus: A Memoir of a Crime
Chosen as 2024 One Book One Nebraska
People across Nebraska are encouraged to read the work of a Nebraskan —
and then talk about it with their friends and neighbors. Dancing with
the Octopus: A Memoir of a Crime (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) by Debora Harding
is the 2024 One Book One Nebraska selection.
For readers of Educated and The Glass Castle, a
harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring memoir of childhood trauma
and its long reach into adulthood. One Omaha winter day in November 1978,
when Debora Harding was just fourteen, she was abducted at knife point from
a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom,
and then left to die as an ice storm descended over the city. Debora
survived. She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her
teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move
on. Denial became the family coping strategy offered by her fun-loving,
conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother. It wasn’t until decades
later – when beset by the symptoms of PTSD- that Debora undertook a radical
project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to
reconsider and reimagine his complex story. This was a quest for the truth
that would threaten the lie at the heart of her family and with it the
sacred bond that once saved her. Dexterously shifting between the past and
present, Debora Harding untangles the incident of her kidnapping and escape
from unexpected angles, offering a vivid, intimate portrait of one family’s
disintegration in the 1970s Midwest. Written with dark humor and the pacing
of a thriller, Dancing with the Octopus is a literary tour de force
and a groundbreaking narrative of reckoning, recovery, and the inexhaustible
strength it takes to survive.
Debora Harding spent her childhood in the midwest prairie states of
Nebraska and Iowa. At the age of nineteen she dropped out of university to
work for Senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaign, before relocating to
Washington DC to run an environmental non-profit. Fed up with politics, she
cycled across America where she met her English husband, author Thomas
Harding. She then joined him in the UK and worked at an award-winning video
production company that focused on the counter-culture protest movement in
Europe. Later, she co-founded the UK’s first local television station in
Oxford and gave birth to two children, Kadian and Sam. Wanting the children
to enjoy the great outdoors, the family moved back to the USA, and Debora
trained as a restorative justice mediator and ran an independent bicycle
business. She is now a full-time writer and activist, and splits her time
between the UK and the US.
Libraries across Nebraska will join other literary and cultural
organizations in planning book discussions, activities, and events that will
encourage Nebraskans to read and discuss this book. Support materials to
assist with local reading/discussion activities will be available after
January 1, 2024 at
http://onebook.nebraska.gov. Updates and activity listings will be
posted on the One Book One Nebraska Facebook page at
http://www.facebook.com/onebookonenebraska.
2024 will mark the twentieth year of the One Book One Nebraska reading
program, sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book. It encourages
Nebraskans across the state to read and discuss one book, chosen from books
written by Nebraska authors or that have a Nebraska theme or setting. The
Nebraska Center for the Book invites recommendations for One Book One
Nebraska book selection year-round at
http://centerforthebook.nebraska.gov/obon-nomination.asp.
One Book One Nebraska is sponsored by Nebraska Center for the Book,
Humanities Nebraska, and Nebraska Library Commission. The Nebraska Center
for the Book brings together the state’s readers, writers, booksellers,
librarians, publishers, printers, educators, and scholars to build the
community of the book, supporting programs to celebrate and stimulate public
interest in books, reading, and the written word. The Nebraska Center for
the Book is housed at and supported by the Nebraska Library Commission.
As the state library agency, the Nebraska Library Commission is an
advocate for the library and information needs of all Nebraskans. The
mission of the Library Commission is statewide promotion, development, and
coordination of library and information services, “bringing together people
and information.”
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The most up-to-date news releases from the Nebraska Library Commission
are always available on the Library Commission website,
http://nlc.nebraska.gov/publications/newsreleases.