Scared Selfless

Michelle Stevens has a photo of the exact moment her childhood was stolen from her. In it, she's only eight years old and posing for her mother's beguiling boyfriend, Gary Lundquist—an elementary school teacher, neighborhood stalwart, and brutal pedophile. Later that night, Gary locks Michelle in a cage, tortures her repeatedly, and uses her to quench his voracious and deviant sexual whims. Michelle can also pinpoint the moment she reconstituted the splintered pieces of her life. Just a few years after being confined to a mental hospital and at the mercy of an alternate personality who kept trolling for sadistic men, she's in cap and gown receiving her Ph.D. in psychology—and the university's award for best dissertation. The distance between these two points is the improbable journey from torture, loss, and mental illness to recovery that is Michelle Stevens's powerful memoir, Scared Selfless. Gary Lundquist kept Michelle as his sex slave for six...