André: The painful experiences have been with me all my life. All of those experiences have been with me. They just came out because those things that I've kept bottled up in my brain, in my mind, for decades and decades -- this book was, in a way, a cleansing. It was so much a cleansing. I realize now that I've completed the book that it was a cleansing of the spirit and the soul. I feel very proud of it. It cleansed my soul. I had never spoken of my serial sexual abuse to anyone, no one in my family, no therapist, nothing. When I was growing up in the South, African American people of just modest means did not have therapists to go to. You couldn't go to your church because that was shaming. I just thought that I could not say that to anyone. I was the only child. I thought that whatever this was that had happened to me, if I told my grandmother, it would probably hurt her and she’d be very devastated, or I would be sent away to a reform school. I never talked about those things.