'A paedophile can make a child's world ecstatic': Anger at girl's book that reveals her affection for 15-year abuser
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Controversial: Author Margaux Fragoso who met her abuser in a New Jersey public pool when she was seven
A graphic account of an American girl's 15-year affair with a paedophile from the age of seven is shocking the literary world.
Margaux Fragoso's book, Tiger Tiger, has been compared to the novel Lolita while other critics have condemned its sexual content as pornography.
Fragoso, who grew up in New Jersey, wrote the book after her married abuser killed himself in 2001 at the age of 66 by leaping off a cliff.
It has already been sold to more than 20 countries and is published this month in the U.S.
Fragoso, now a 31-year-old married mother of a daughter living in New Orleans, tells how she first met Peter Curran - not his real name - at a public swimming pool near her home.
Curran, then 51, was splashing his two sons with water and she asked if she could play too. From that moment she was drawn into his seedy world.
With a drunken father and a mentally ill mother, she became an easy target for a man who unknown to her had a conviction for a sexual assault against a minor.
She says in her book:' Spending time with a paedophile can be like a drug high.' [He] can make the child's world...ecstatic somehow.'
Fragoso describes how their relationship slowly developed after he called her mother and invited the youngster to play with his children.
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ShareIn the basement, his games became more sinister, but Fragoso went along with it even though she now describes him as an 'ugly old man.'
Graphic: The book has been sold to 20 countries and is published in the U.S. this month
The games included giving a her a 'swift' kiss on the lips every time they found the right piece while doing a jigsaw puzzle together.
In the synopsis she writes: 'I still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time.
'At two in the afternoon, when he would come and pick me up and take me for rides; at five, when I would read to him, head on his chest; in the despair at seven pm, when he would hold me and rub my belly for an hour.
'In the despair again at nine pm when we would go for a night ride where I would buy a cup of coffee with precisely seven sugars and a lot of cream.
'We were friends, soul mates and lovers. I was seven. He was fifty-one.'
Reviewers in the U.S. and Canada have questioned the truth of her account because the memoir reads more like a novel and love story.
Her first sexual contact with Curran at eight-years-old was described by the New York Times review as 'perhaps the most indecent thing published in any major book of the last decade.'
Fragoso, who attended creative writing courses at Binghampton University in New York, vividly and poetically recounts events and conversations from her childhood.
But her publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have no doubts about the veracity of the book.
Executive Editor Courtney Hodell told the Sunday Times: 'We have a journal she wrote at 12. It is an account of their relationship in her child's handwriting.
Tiger Tiger has been likened to the book Lolita, which was turned into a film by Stanley Kubrick starring James Mason and Sue Lyon (above) in 1961
'You can imagine it is very disturbing stuff. We also have letters he wrote to her that span many years.'
She admitted the name of the abuser had been changed but said Fragoso had deliberately told her story in detail to show how a paedophile manipulates his victim.
Fragoso, whose short stories and poems have appeared in The Literary Review and other journals, defended the amount of sex in her book.
She told the Globe and Mail: 'I didn’t want to write about the sex, but encouragement [from editors and creative writing professors] came about because in earlier drafts, without that horrifying sexuality, it read as a romance.
'I’m not that child any more so I can see him for what he is. The inner child in me wants to believe something else but the adult part says, ‘No, I’m sorry. He’s not a good person. He’s actually quite monstrous.’ He was like a cult leader.'
Fragoso said she had a romantic view of her abuser and wanted to marry him when she was seven.
For two years, her father kept her away from Curran, suspicious of his motives, but her mother helped reunite them.
She told the paper: “One of the tactics everybody needs to be aware of is that paedophiles will be nice in order to gain trust.'
Fragoso has now found happiness with her own family and says: 'I always thought no one would care for me. I felt ruined. But I have found out what real love is.'
Maria Gillan, professor of English at Binghampton, knew Fragoso when she first began writing Tiger Tiger and described her as 'shy and emotionally fragile'.
She said: 'Confronting all the issues was a very difficult thing for her. I think she did a good job of coming to an understanding of herself and the relationship.
'My sense is that she had to get it down as a way of getting it off her back. If anything I think she toned it down.'
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