“Trial by Fire” memoir details stalking

MEMOIR

There is an intriguing irony at the heart of Kaia Anderson’s harrowing, maddening new memoir, “Trial by Fire.”

The Longmont author is still in the vortex of one of Colorado’s most appalling and infamous stalking cases. For more than three decades, a mentally ill man named Robert Vinyard has single-mindedly harassed, threatened and terrorized Anderson and her family. Thanks to the failures of a judicial system that continually elevated the stalker’s rights over hers, even jails and civic institutions failed to stop his obsessive contacts.

Yet from the very beginning of an ordeal that surely would have broken many people, Anderson refused to compromise her core beliefs. She understood why friends counseled her to buy a gun, but refused to abandon her nonviolent ethics. When people advised her to run away and disappear, she wouldn’t let a sick, delusional man determine the course of her life. And when the system showed more concern for healing her stalker than the safety of her family, Anderson never stopped speaking her truth.

Simply put, she refused to surrender. Yet one of the key lessons Anderson learned while working with a single therapist throughout the ordeal was the spiritual importance of ... surrender.

The therapist, identified only as Mary, counseled: “When you feel you’re resisting, surrender. When you feel an emotional hook, surrender it. Surrender your fear. Surrender beliefs that don’t serve. Surrender control.”

In clean, evocative and powerfully honest prose, “Trial by Fire” plunges the reader not only into the depths of Anderson’s horrifying, Kafkaesque ordeal and the mad labyrinth of the modern U.S. justice system, but also on her journey of self-discovery.

And thank goodness. Her deeply documented account of her experience — which, tragically, continues, despite Vinyard’s current incarceration in a mental institution — is frankly exhausting and enraging. Alternating segments about her continuing recovery offer the reader much-needed respite from the madness.

One of the most poignant and painful aspects of the story is Anderson’s early self-doubt — had she “done” something to encourage the madman? The two first met while students at the University of Colorado. Conditioned by a society that insists women be perpetually kind and welcoming, Anderson was kind to the awkward Vinyard, going so far as to invite him in for tea the first time he showed up on her doorstep.

Soon after she married in 1979, Vinyard appeared at the couple’s Boulder home demanding that Anderson “come now and be with me.” When she asked him to leave, he exploded in rage, shouting and pounding the outside of the house. The police officer who took their report asked questions as, “What did you do to encourage him?” and “Do you wear lipstick?”

That was just the first of countless failures on the part of law enforcement and the judicial system.

Anderson’s “Trial by Fire,” though self-published, is a highly professional, riveting account of an ordeal few can imagine, but also a moving and thoughtful spiritual memoir.