Not My Fault

LoveReading Says

Trish Hinde’s wants the lasting message of her memoir to be that secrets are never a good thing. 

She spent her childhood and much of her adult life not revealing her worst secret: that her father had sexually abused and raped her on multiple occasions. He told her to keep it a secret, and she listened to him.

In Not My Fault, which she wrote with Ann Cusack, Hinde details the horror of her father’s actions, but also the chaotic home life that went with it. One of six siblings, Hinde recounts the food shortages, the utilities being cut off and even the mysterious deaths—one after the other—of her guinea pigs, hamsters and rabbits. 

Hinde’s sexual abuse only stopped once her father was sent to prison for the sexual abuse of another child. As time went on, she reported the abuse on four separate occasions—including in a school essay and in a letter to her social worker—only for the reports to be ignored. Finally, on the fifth report to police in 2020, she was taken seriously. In 2022, her father was convicted of rape, indecent assault and indecency with a child and sentenced to jail. 

Now a mother to four children herself, Hinde writes that the most important thing was that someone listened to her, and believed her. She also knows that it was not her fault. 

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