A heartbreaking memoir

BRUTAL LEGACY Tracy Going Loot.co.za (R170) MF Book Joburg

TRACY Going is an award-winning former television and radio news anchor, best remembered for SABC2’s Morning Live and as a prime-time news anchor for Radio Metro and Kaya FM.

Twenty years ago, photographs of her battered face were splashed over the media, shocking the nation.

Her memoir, Brutal Legacy, reveals a legacy of domestic violence starting in her childhood home and the unpredictable rage of her alcoholic father and culminating in a whirlwind love relationship with its brutally violent climax.

That short relationship led to a two-and-a-half-year legal ordeal played out in the public eye in court.

Tracy’s Friday afternoon sessions with an Alateen counsellor gave comfort and the understanding that her father’s compulsive drinking was a dreadful disease. The counsellor told her that we were responsible for our own futures … “but I already knew my story, I was going to be an actress or a television presenter, I would write a book one day – and I would never be beaten up”.

Those prophetic thoughts largely came to be, two of them were achieved … except the last one.

“As I stood before him all I could see were the lies, the disappearing for days without warning, the screaming, the threats, the terror, the hostage-holding, the keeping me up all night, the dragging me through the house by my hair, the choking, the doors locked around me, the phones disconnected, the fear and the uncertainty.”

The physical wounds healed, but her horrendous experience left her with severe emotional damage.

She declined into depression, due to the highly public nature of her assault, her career collapsed immediately and it took a decade to undo the psychological wounds in her search for safety and the reclaiming of self.

At her first book launch, heart-warming evidence of the uptick in Going’s long journey was her frequent warm toothy smile.

In answer to the question, who have you written the book for, she replied: “I suppose for myself.”

Brutal Legacy is a powerful but harrowing read.

It is for emotionally strong readers, and there is much in it that will leave you gasping for air.

Going has written a gripping, well-written account of survival and recovery from her brutal past, one that could easily not have had a positive ending.

Brava brava brava, Tracy Going!