Book Review: A Stolen Life: A Memoir By Jaycee Dugard

This book, well, I read it in a few hours. It is not well written, but Jaycee Dugard was never educated beyond the 5th grade or something like that and certainly controlled by therapists. Now the whole story of her being kidnapped by Phillip Garrido became about a hundred times more interesting when I heard Phillip Garrido’s music which is amazing, because then the story becomes like that of Phil Spector or Ian Curtis, the story of a musical genius destroyed by madness. We don’t get a book like Deborah Curtis’ excellent Touching from a Distance or any of the very good Phil Spector biographies out of Jaycee Duagard in that Garrido’s music is only mentioned a few times and in passing.
He does come off as being completely insane in this book. The rape scenes are in places very graphic. The first part of the book he’s got her chained up and uses her to fulfill his pedophilic sex urges while he binges on crystal meth. When she gave birth to his two children he became less sexually abusive to her, but she was forced to enact this very odd fake “family” life. Of course, he and his wife and accomplice Nancy Garrido were no real family to her, being a bunch of meth addicts that kidnapped her for sexual purposes, but Garrido’s madness was such that he was in denial about that. The second clause to that, the odd fake family life in which she was forced to take part, is almost really nearly as sick as the rape was.
The other thing about that case is that there was some fairly unreal incompetence going on with the California parole system. That I would like to understand better- Garrido was on a parole for sex offenses, failed drug tests, and yet they never once checked the shacks in his backyard. If Garrido had, at some point stabbed Jaycee Dugard and buried her in his backyard, he’d still be walking around the streets today, it looks like. Of course, he stupidly took her and the two children with him to a college campus and then his parole office. Daytime television, of course, was never the same. When a schitzoid on crystal meth outsmarts the California parole system for nearly twenty years, you know that the system must be changed, because according to Dugard the dude was hearing voices coming out of his walls.