A Child Called "It"

It is published as a memoir of Dave Pelzer's own childhood in Daly City, California, and is written as first-person non-fiction. Its accuracy has been publicly questioned. In "Dysfunction for Dollars" (The New York Times Magazine, 28 July 2002), Pat Jordan wrote that Pelzer had "exquisite recall of his abuse, but almost no recall of anything that would authenticate that abuse." Pelzer's brother Stephen has denied that the abuse took place; another brother, Richard Pelzer, corroborates much of the account in his own memoir, A Brother's Journey. Readers should know it as a contested memoir rather than a documented case history.

A Child Called "It" (1995) comes first and covers Pelzer's childhood up to his removal from the home in 1973. The Lost Boy (1997) follows him through the foster system, and A Man Named Dave (1999) covers his adult life. Each is written to stand on its own, but they read best in that order.

It is a direct, sustained account of severe physical and psychological child abuse, described plainly and at length from the child's point of view — including starvation, beatings, burning, forced ingestion of household chemicals, and prolonged emotional cruelty by a parent. There is no sexual content. Readers who find depictions of child abuse, domestic violence or parental alcoholism distressing should approach it carefully; it is short, but relentless.