Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood

Mills (Next of Kin) chronicles his experience of sexual abuse by a serial predator, starting in 1968, when the author was 13. He writes that after his father’s death when Mills was four, his relationship with his mother was strained, which he believes made him vulnerable to the predations of Dan Farinella, the director of Camp Ella Fohs, the Jewish summer camp Mills attended in Connecticut. Farinella groomed Mills and ingratiated himself to the Mills family with gifts and boxes of cannoli. Mills’s book effectively portrays the feelings of utter confusion, fear, and shame that accompanied each assault by Farinella. He had viewed Farinella as a mentor, someone who cared about his future and lavished time on him; like so many other adolescent victims, he did not initially recognize his encounters with Farinella as abuse. The reckoning came later, and at great cost to his physical and mental health. After experiencing drug addiction, run-ins with the law, panic attacks, and harrowing nightmares, Mills sought help. He was slow to connect his anguish with the abuse and his persistent denial is emblematic of the self-blame many victims carry into adulthood. He eventually attains clarity, but the institutions that enabled Farinella have never been held accountable.