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Pieces of Pie
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Paperback, 242 pp, $15.95.
Also available at Amazon.com
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Read an excerpt
Recovery Makes a Rousing Good Read
There are action-packed stories filled with glamour, seduction and suspense … and then, there are deeply courageous accounts of recovery and personal growth. It's a rare synchronicity when these two genres are bundled into one, but that's what you'll find in this fascinating first book by Pie Dumas.
On one level, Pieces of Pie tells a raw and candid story of Pie’s inner struggle with the bewildering implications of childhood incest—and for this reason alone, it offers invaluable guidance for anyone who longs to reconnect with their authentic spirit.
On another level, it is a richly detailed and readable travelogue and adventure story, which takes the reader …
… from a drab inner office in Ohio where young Pie is forced by her father into years of child labor
… to the carnival circuit, where she lugs her father’s merchandise display cases.
… to seedy, brutal underworld encounters, affairs with black men, fashionable life in a swank Central Park apartment, and a private audience with the king of Thailand.
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If fact sometimes reads like fiction, it’s only because Pie’s impetuous nature and her Armenian father’s magnetic influence steer her into situations where few upper-middle-class girls would venture. The notorious George Dumas is alternately diabolic and appealing. Yet, the book’s most powerful character may be the abuse itself. Even as it remains entirely repressed in young Pie’s consciousness, and therefore invisible in her daily life, incest remains a potent, dark presence underlying every one of her actions and experiences.
Ultimately, this is an exhilarating tale of self-discovery, of a reunion of spirit, and of a full life that only really begins as the last page is turned.
Finding Heart in a House of Cardboard
by Polly Turner
Pie Dumas’ new book, Pieces of Pie, opens with an image of a lonely little girl sitting in a cardboard house, decorating its interior walls with the smiling faces of imaginary family members. That image seems to linger—as indelible as the colored marker young Pie draws with—all the way through to the book’s final, moving paragraphs.
Flimsy as the cardboard walls are and no matter how often they must be rebuilt, redecorated and refastened with brown shipping tape, they are the youngster’s only sanctuary from the horrific betrayal she is subjected to almost daily, and which she represses entirely from her awareness.
In a way, those walls also are symbolic of the fragile identity Pie Dumas must construct and reconstruct well into her adulthood. In Pieces of Pie Dumas shares the most delightful, devastating and intimate details of her life, sometimes as matter-of-factly as penning a grocery list. Yet how else could she describe those early years, during which she was spat upon, humiliated, and subjected to atrocities of incest that she could acknowledge only in her nightmares? It’s only through living out her saga of shallow relationships, impetuous actions, and inevitably therapy, that Pie starts to gain a real sense of self—constructed not out of cardboard and magic marker, but of flesh, blood and heart. As it turns out, lots of heart.
Even beyond the theme of recovery and personal growth, Dumas has a real story to tell. There is a depth of imagery and of character, and notably, a fascinating picture of Midwest America and global commerce viewed from under the coattails of Pie’s abusive father, an Old-World Armenian. A high schooler’s round-the-world trip with her dad and cousin reveals a richness of beauty, history and self-discovery. There are haunting images of a burning corpse by the River Ganges, a first kiss in Venice … and a harrowing account of Pie’s first driving lesson from her drunken father in a Volkswagen Beetle on the icy curves of a Swiss Alpen pass. In another, poignant scene, young Pie is stranded alone in the vast Sahara Desert under a baking sun—conversing with her ornery, wayward camel who seems a kind of kindred spirit—waiting for her father to find her.
A giant fan blows stifling air through the back room of “the office,” the dreaded building where Pie spends years in child labor. There’s the grisly Jack Nicholson grin of her former husband, whose name alone can make a reader’s skin crawl. There’s a sensual interlude with a honey-haired Russian spy; sadistic torture at the hands of a boyfriend; and a first rendezvous with a daughter given up for adoption.
Most memorable, though, are the book’s final pages. One is left amazed at how such a destitute spirit, branded as evil and violated by her father from her earliest years, can ultimately arrive at such an inspiring level of redemption, wholeness, and happiness.
Polly Turner is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlottesville, Va. This review may be reprinted freely with appropriate attribution to the author. Please send two tear sheets of published reviews to Skye’s the Limit Publishing, P.O. Box 279, Scottsville, VA 24590
Pieces of Pie: Surviving Love
by Pie Dumas
Skye’s the Limit Publications
Publication date: September 2005
ISBN: 0-9765608-0-1, $15.95, paperback, 242 pp
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