As a child, she had to forget in order to survive. As an adult, she had to remember in order to be free. Judith Mattison had a conventional 1940s Midwestern childhood, followed by college, marriage, and children. Still, throughout her life, she was haunted by a mysterious terror of deer head hunting trophies. With the help of a therapist, she began to recover memories of severe abuse at the hands of her father. Unearthing her repressed past, she learned that forgetting was how she coped as a child. Remembering as an adult broke her apart-and then put her together again. In the process, she struggled to overcome shame and fear, to embrace anger, and to claim her truth.
