Daddy’s Rules - Softcover

'Remarkable...brave, hard-won, and gorgeously written. As tautly strung and delicate as a high-wire.' Dani Shapiro, author of ‘Black and White’

'Sontag's lean writing captures the tension – the feeling of family as prison. Each time an outside observer recognizes her father's manipulative cruelty, the reader feels a little surge of hope. Get out of there, Rachel! Get out!' Los Angeles Times

'One of the most moving memoirs you'll ever read and one which leaves you with a sense of hope at the courage of the human spirit.’ Sunday Post

'As Rachel Sontag makes clear in her searing memoir, emotional abuse can be as devastating, as cruel, as the most severe physical and sexual maltreatment...What is remarkable and inspiring is that Sontag emerged from the situation a stronger person.' San Francisco Chronicle

Her father ruled her world. Her mother couldn’t save her. So she had to save herself.

Rachel Sontag grew up in a family of four whose apparently happy exterior concealed a disturbing pattern of psychological abuse by her father and a distressing passivity on her mother’s part.

Rachel was a bright and loving girl who tried to please her parents. But nothing was ever good enough for her pathologically controlling father, who would drag her out of bed in the middle of the night and force her to repeat after him: ‘I’m stupid, I’m worthless, I wish I had never been born’. Her mother, on and off anti-depressants and entirely under the sway of her husband, could – or would – do nothing but watch.

As Rachel’s family slowly crumbles under the pressure of a man who refuses to accept his children for what they are, Rachel is forced to ever greater extremes in order to free herself from his crushing grip, in this compelling and beautifully written memoir.