Being Mean

Being Mean is about learning how to acknowledge and live with incomprehensible experiences in the healthiest ways possible. Told in vignettes relative to markers of age and experience, Patricia Eagle reveals the heartbreak and destruction of sexual abuse, from age four to thirteen, by her father. Eagle uses dissociation and numbing in response to his abusive behavior, her mother’s complacency, and as a way to block her own sense of self.

How does a child come to know what is safe or unsafe, right or wrong, normal or abnormal? How does a young woman learn the difference between real love and a desire for sexual pleasure stimulated by abusive childhood sexual experiences? Careening through life, Eagle wonders how to trust others and, most importantly, herself. As a mature woman struggling to understand and live with her past, she remains earnest in her pursuit of clarity, compassion, and trust.

Patricia Eagle composed her first dog-love story at age ten and published her first book, Being Mean: A Memoir of Sexual Abuse and Survival, in her sixties. As a writer, speaker, and memorial and wedding celebrant, Eagle weaves meaning into stories that acknowledge and honor our lives’ paths. The death of her dog-loving spouse to cancer just prior to publication of Dog Love Stories has left Eagle to blaze a new trail—life after profound loss—with their dog, Mercy. She and Mercy live among the wonders of the San Luis Valley in South-Central Colorado.