How to Cook Your Daughter: A Memoir

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Harper Collins, 6. okt 2009 - 288 pages

From the daughter of the bestselling author of Father Joe: the poignant and ultimately hopeful memoir of a young girl’s struggle to live a normal childhood in the chaotic seventies, and to overcome sexual abuse by her famous father

Earlier this year, Tony Hendra’s memoir, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The book detailed his life as a comedian who launched the careers of John Belushi and Chevy Chase and helped create such cult classics as This Is Spinal Tap, while he struggled with inner demons including alcohol and drug abuse. But there was a glaring omission in his supposed tell-all confessional: his sexual abuse of his daughter, Jessica Hendra, when she was a young girl.

After more than thirty years of silence, Hendra has decided to reveal the truth. In this poignant memoir, she reveals the full story behind the New York Times article that rocked the world and detailed her father’s crimes. But Jessica’s story is no footnote to her father’s story. No One Was Listening is also the inspiring story of her own journey, and how she was finally able to find healing within, after years of struggling with anorexia, bulimia, and low self-esteem. Set against the backdrop of the chaotic seventies, Hendra’s memoir follows Jessica and her sister Kathy as they strove to make a normal life for themselves amidst the madness, sex, and drug abuse that her parents and their friends—many of the household names in the world of show business—participated in. No One Was Listening reveals the hope and heartache of a young girl who was faced with a loss of innocence at an early age, who faced a slow and painful recovery, and who finally found contentment and peace within.

From inside the book

Contents

PART
1
PART II
81
PART III
153
PART IV
239
Copyright

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Page 225 - I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying: Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
Page 225 - My dove, my undefiled is but one ; She is the only one of her mother, She is the choice one of her that bare her.
Page 225 - This thy stature is like to a palm tree, And thy breasts to clusters of grapes. 1 said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof : Now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, And the smell of thy nose like apples...
Page 225 - I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples; And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.
Page 225 - ... thy two breasts are like two young roses that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
Page 223 - I'll tell you what to do,
Page 4 - Saints are perhaps always best evoked by sinners. And it would be hard to think of someone more at ease in the world of modern sin than Tony Hendra.
Page 5 - Cardassian female . . . [who] posed as a scientific colleague of Ulani and Gilora and attempted to sabotage a joint Cardassian-Bajoran scientific effort to place a subspace relay in the Gamma Quadrant.
Page 68 - Oh, Colorado's calling me From her hillsides and her rivers and Her mesas and her trees, When blizzards snap the power lines And all the toilets freeze, In December in the Colorado Rockies . . . I sang along to most of the lyrics of "Colorado," but I always skipped one part: The baby didn't die until we'd burned Up all our wood.
Page 103 - A fight, a fight, a nigger and a white. If the nigger don't win, we'll jump in!

About the author (2009)

Jessica Hendra lives with her husband and two daughters in Los Angeles, California.

Bibliographic information