Mill Valley author details her ‘stolen childhood’ in new memoir

When Penny Lane was just 4 years old, her world was turned upside down.

Her idyllic childhood came to a screeching halt when a “strange man” she’d come to learn was her father unexpectedly took her from her home to whisk her off to live with him, her stepmother and eventually her half-siblings across the country in California. In fact, she’d find out that the loving woman she thought was her mother was actually her aunt, Charlotte, who cared for her with her Uncle George after her mother died when she was a baby.

Sitting in the car as it drove away from all she’d ever known, she felt like she was in a dream. It would be more than 50 years before she saw her Aunt Charlotte again.

“In that moment, I had no way of knowing that my carefree, happy life was about to turn into a nightmare I could never have imagined. That I was being ripped from my loving home into a world full of fear, neglect, and abuse that would take decades to escape. That I was about to become an unwanted alien, lost in a cold, foreign home, and a powerless scapegoat lacking any sense of self or worth, one that not even God could save. Until I finally broke free and found a way to stand on my own,” the Mill Valley resident writes in her memoir, “Redeemed: A Memoir of a Stolen Childhood,” which came out this summer.

In it, she details the emotional and physical abuse she suffered in her new home, having an alcoholic, unloving father and hearing her stepmother grumble about having to raise “her husband’s bastard child.” After leaving home, she meets and marries a man who has become a fundamentalist Christian, exposing her to a church that subjects her to years of forced confessions, secretive disciplinary actions and ostracization.

But through her self-empowerment journey, she finds her way to happiness on her own terms and learns to “give yourself what others have denied you.”

Lane will speak about her memoir at 6 p.m. Monday at the Belvedere Tiburon Library and at 7 p.m. Oct. 30 on Zoom through San Francisco’s Jewish Community Library. Register for the free events at beltiblibrary.org and jewishcommunitylibrary.org/events-listing/redeemed, respectively.

Before her events, she took the time to reflect on her healing and writing journey.

Q What inspired you to write this?

A A person like me, an abused person, generally we hide our abuse. We’re ashamed. And our abusers have told us to keep quiet about it and maybe even denied it or made us a “bad guy.” In our heart of hearts, we know that we’re not wrong, but yet part of us says, I don’t want to tell anybody because what if they judge me, too? What if they think I’m wrong? And the other thing is we don’t want to appear “other.”

When I started opening up with people, and I was choosing people very carefully, people would keep saying to me, “Penny, I can’t believe this is true about you. You need to write a book.” I must have heard that a couple dozen times. The person who they saw in front of them was confident, smart, determined, successful and energetic. And then when I tell them about my background, they’re like, “I can’t believe it. How do you live through that?”

What finally made me say, I’m going to do this, was in 2019. I’m a software salesperson and I was at a sales conference with LinkedIn. They brought in a motivational speaker. He had us close our eyes, take quiet breaths and slow our heart down. He says, “If you could do anything in the world and money was not in the way, what would you do?” And, of course, the first thing that popped in my mind was to write a book. He then said, “Now for how many people here was it writing a book?” And about 25% of the audience raised their hand. And he said, “Now how many of you guys are going to do this?” He told us to turn to the person sitting next to you, who just happened to be one of my bosses, Aaron Weidner. He’s in the acknowledgement. I told him that’s what I’m going to do. It was time.

Q What was the motivation behind it?

A When I was coming out of my trauma, when I left the church and I landed in San Francisco, I was a broken person. I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember. I couldn’t find any books about normal everyday people who had overcome what I had been through. “Bastard Out of Carolina” by Dorothy Allison came out later. Until I read that, I kind of thought I was the only one who was this abused. I didn’t know that there’s whole groups of people, whole organizations for adult survivors of child abuse. I didn’t know because I kept it a secret.

I was in therapy, but somehow it didn’t click. The other reason to write a book is because people need to hear these stories so that they feel comfortable talking about it, and it removes the stigma and then it becomes normal to talk about it.

Q Did you still feel that stigma?

A The first time I talked about it publicly was in June, when a good friend in Marin threw me a private launch party, and I invited my closest friends, co-workers, my husband and people from my temple, Congregation Rodef Sholom. Until I saw the reception, and since then I’ve had public talks, where people have overwhelmingly supported me and thanked me for sharing and came up to me afterwards and said, “Can we have lunch? I need to tell you my story,” I was afraid.

Q It must have been amazing to have that reaction.

A It’s been very validating. It’s a very difficult decision to write a book like this and put it all out there, but I wanted my story to be out there in the world. My stepmother and father are dead. I don’t talk to my sister and brother. But also writing the book it’s like, here’s my story, and you don’t get to have a say. I didn’t do it to heal myself because I felt like I was pretty much on the end of being healed or close to being healed. But I can tell you it’s been very healing.

Q Do you have any empathy toward your family now?

A What’s really interesting is people have asked me if I’ve forgiven my stepmother. Someone in the audience argued with me a little bit, saying forgiveness is not for this person, it’s for you. What I said was the reason they say that is because they think that not forgiving holds me back, but it hasn’t held me back. I was able to get to a point in my life where I’m able to see the other side, which is that she was a broken person and that he was a broken person. And maybe that’s empathy, like you said. I don’t call that forgiveness. I call it understanding.

Q How did these experiences shape you?

A I would give anything to not have had this childhood, because of the bad traits I have because of it: the fear, anxiety, worry and the inability to let go. But, I think it has made me a better person. I will always root for the underdog. I love helping the less fortunate. I volunteer at Bahia Vista Elementary School. I help first-generation college students at 10,000 Degrees find jobs and do their LinkedIn profiles. I do all this stuff because I know what it’s like to be that close to not having groceries, or being other, or not knowing how to find a job in the real world.

So that’s the yin and yang I live with, that’s what’s inside that the world doesn’t always get to see, but that never really leaves you.

Q After leaving the church, you eventually find solace in Judaism. Can you speak about that?

A I always was fascinated by Judaism. I’d go into the temple in my neighborhood, but I would sneak in just to get a peek. And then much later, after I left the church, got divorced and remarried, I caught myself saying to myself, if my husband ever dies, then I’ll convert. And it kind of shook me up like why would you say that? I mustered up my courage. I did some googling. I found this temple, and I read what the rabbi said you should do to start. And I did all those things, but before I did, I said to my husband, “I’m thinking about converting to Judaism. What do you think?” Because I knew he’s not religious at all. He, of course, was and is very supportive. Later, the rabbi said to me, “I want you to come to Friday night services.” I came and started crying because it just felt like home. In my heart, I felt like this is where I belong. And they love me. They accept me. It’s a wonderful thing.

Q What do you hope people take from this?

A I would be honored if they told me that I helped them in some little way at pennylanewriter.com. Then, it would all be worthwhile, even the trauma that I went through, because in my faith, we have a saying, “If you save one person, you save the world.” I hope that my book inspires people to go get help, to talk about their trauma, and also for others to be listeners, allies and support systems for those who are traumatized.