Living With Ordeal: How Linda Lovelace Haunts My Heart

Content Warning: This review discusses sexual abuse, coercion, and trauma. The memoir itself contains graphic depictions of abuse that may be triggering.

I read Ordeal by Linda Lovelace over the holiday break. Or, more accurately, I devoured it—and it devoured me in return, body and soul, leaving nothing behind. No trace remaining of the woman I was before I read it.

It inhabited me. Not in the way great literature does—through beautiful prose that lingers like perfume, or a story that quietly alters your soul—but in a deeper, more permanent way. The kind that embeds itself beneath the skin.

I am no stranger to the consuming power of the written word. I have been shaped, softened, and sharpened by it. Esther Greenwood¹ and I share an understanding of life; I have felt her pain, sometimes more vividly than my own. The unnamed Mrs. de Winter² has kept me company for years, like a secret lover I return to in the quiet night. But Linda, you stay with me for an entirely different reason.

You haunt me.

You are the shadow on my back, the dark weight I can’t set down. Your ordeal split me open and left me exposed. I cried with you. I hurt with you—and I don’t know how to exist comfortably after reading your story. Something in me shifted, and I don’t yet know how to replace what I've lost.

There is a single quote—one moment in a memoir already heavy with horror—that broke me. It is the punctum of this memoir: the wound that will not close. And it is why I cannot, in good conscience, recommend anyone read Ordeal.

“And now, as always, I asked myself one question: would he really have shot me? Even today, I think yes—yes, he would have killed me on the spot. And then I ask myself this: would I do the same thing if it were truly happening to me today? Would I go through it all again? No. No, today I would take the bullet” (Lovelace, 42). 

This quote hurt me.

And I will not pass that hurt on to someone else.

I know—every woman knows—that some men derive pleasure from our pain. But your words forced me to confront a darker truth: that for every sadist, countless others are willing to participate. To watch. To enable. To stay silent. 

And, worst of all, even ten years removed from the ordeal, you would still have chosen the bullet.

How am I meant to live with this knowledge, Linda? How did you?

We tell ourselves that the only way to endure truly heinous abuse is to believe it will end—that life, once removed from the pain, will be worth living. That hope is our lifeline. It is how we survive.

But what happens when the pain ends, and hope does not survive its rupture?

Is life still worth living then, Linda?

Yours is not a story of glamour or success. It is a record of years defined by coercion, violence, and control—by a husband and manager who erased Linda Boreman to manufacture Linda Lovelace.

What was sold as performance was, in reality, a documentary of abuse. That abuse was made visible and consumed by millions. It was screened in classrooms. That is where I first encountered it—seated in an auditorium with two hundred other university students, debating its cinematic merits rather than confronting the horror it contained.

We have decided, as a society, that voyeurism is a legitimate pastime. We watch until we are bored. Then we forget.

But you didn’t forget, Linda.

You lived with the weight of our voyeurism. You carried the burden of our silence. And in telling your story, you reminded me that this burden was never yours alone—it was always ours to share. We all took part in your ordeal, and somehow, that knowledge makes me feel less alone in mine.

I have carried my own ordeal for years. Watching you lay yours down—so much heavier than my own—somehow made mine feel lighter. I consider that your true legacy.

Yes, I know the world will remember the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars grossing pornographic film. But I will not. I will remember this memoir. This story. You. 

I won’t write his name here. He doesn’t deserve one. 

But your final act—though beyond the grave—was reclamation. You left this world first, and shortly after, your abuser followed. It feels as though you ensured his story ended with you and, in doing so, reclaimed what was always yours—your name, your story, your ending. On your own terms. A courtesy he never offered you. 

And for that, and for this memoir, you will never leave me.

Endnotes

¹ Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 1963.

² DuMaurier, Daphne. Rebecca. 1938.

Work Cited

Lovelace, Linda. Ordeal. Citadel Press, 1980.