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Multi-Award-Winning Author Milan Sergent studied creative writing in college and began writing the novel series Candlewicke 13 in 2007 a year after featuring some of the series' characters in his solo art exhibition, titled "Outsiders and Apparitions," near Rockefeller Center in New York City. An artist and poet since adolescence, Sergent's poetic works also won an international book award.
Reviewed by Viga Boland for Readers' Favorite
As a victim of childhood sexual abuse and someone who has mentored other abuse victims as they struggled to write their painful memoirs, I thought I'd heard it all. I believed that nothing else could shock me. Then I read Thirty-Seven-Year Abduction by Milan Sergent. If Sergent had written a horror novel, he couldn't have horrified and saddened me more than this, his memoir of child and adult abuse. I’m not talking about what we usually think of as rape or sexual molestation. Milan’s rape was the long-term violation of a human being, his essence, and his right to be who he was born to be; a gay man. His 37 years of rape began as a result of what, for me, are the archaic religious beliefs of his parents. They continued when a desperate Milan tried to redeem himself in his and everyone else’s eyes through a regular male-to-female marriage and by joining a Pentecostal church.
Thirty-Seven-Year Abduction rivals the best impossible-to-put-down books I have ever read. Milan Sergent has a superb command of language and beautiful control of his pacing and characterization. How he absorbs us into his emotions and makes us feel his deep, ongoing pain is powerful. What Sergent endured for 37 years makes me glad I wasn’t born into an evangelical religion in the deep south. Sergent tried suicide twice. I might have succeeded if his experience had been mine. Sergent spends time at the end of his memoir presenting enlightening information about what I see as a warped practice that began in the early 1900s and continued for decades; that of making boys on swim teams swim in the nude. Did you know that? I was shocked: “Any boy who tried to cover himself was made to feel unmanly or like a nerd.” As Milan shares his closing thoughts on the current narrow attitudes toward LGBTQ, I find myself agreeing whole-heartedly with his statement that “…child abuse is telling children they were born inadequate and sinful and God is watching their every intimate moment and will torture them for eternity in the flames of Hell if they don’t let Him possess them.” My final thoughts on this poignant, gut-wrenching memoir are that I will never forget it. Read it!
