The writing of Fort Worth author Rebecca Allard’s intense and compelling book, Reckless: A Memoir, took 17 years. Describing this book as intense is an understatement.

Allard’s story is an honest and courageous telling of early childhood abuse at the hands of her father and 16 years of abuse from her husband. But it’s more than that. Reckless is Allard’s story of addiction to danger and her long and painful journey in discovering herself and how she recovered from nearly fatal choices.

Why would a middle-class woman from Sweetwater, Texas, fall in love with and marry a convicted felon and psychopath from Harlem?

“Most of us never get this close to the flame,” Allard says.

Her story is set in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. Allard, a former actress, was working in a copy center in 1975, in a building that housed The Family, a theater company for ex-convicts. She was drawn to a man named Al Black. Charming in the beginning, Black showed his true colors after Allard married him. His world was one of violence and drugs, and he wanted her to be a part of it.

There were many factors that created the needs that caused her to be so attracted to him, Allard says.

“The easy answer is that I had suffered abuse from my father, who was mentally ill. That experience when I was 3 years old, combined with the fact that my father was the one who connected with me on an emotional level, was an odd and toxic combination of danger and compassion. It stayed with me. That is the short version of my relationship with Al,” she explains.

Allard says that the journey with him, and his teaching her to be the person he wanted her to be, was also teaching her some amazingly valuable lessons.

“When I look back on this entire experience, it holds everything. It holds the terror of the domestic violence and the gratitude in learning how to navigate in the world, which no one had ever shared with me, and I wasn’t able to figure out for myself. Al was the perfect mix of ecstasy and terror. When I thought I was rebelling against my upbringing, I was just running full-bore straight toward it.”

Allard wants the reader to understand that this could happen to anyone.

“One of the goals in writing this was to demystify who is the victim of domestic violence,” she says. “People want to think that it’s someone who can’t accomplish things in the world, and they are allowing these things to happen to them. The truth is that one-in-four women are victims of domestic abuse. If you’re in a room with a lot of people, you’re in a room with a lot of secrets.”

Reckless pulls the covers off a lifetime of secrets.

“These secrets are not secrets per se but are truths hidden from public view,” she says. “I had to write this book. There had to be a reason I survived to tell this story.”

One woman’s memoir of a harrowing 16-year marriage to an ex-convict.

In 1975, former actress Allard worked in a copy center, in the same building that housed The Family, a theater company for former prisoners. She was quite comfortable with this fact, though, due to her long-term experience with the group as a theater manager. However, Allard eventually found herself drawn to a new member who often came in to make copies. Al Black, she writes, was physically formidable, with dark skin and a tall, highly muscular physique—but as she got to know him, she discovered that his personality was also larger-than-life. Black seemed to be reformed, but Allard saw how intense he became when telling violent stories of his past crimes. A big part of her was afraid of what he was capable of, but she was also oddly intrigued; Black was nothing like her milquetoast husband. After she married Black, however, she found out that the caring part of his personality was a facade. He soon plunged her into a dark, horrifying world of drugs, violence, sex and humiliation that she could never have imagined. With perfect clarity, Allard recounts almost two decades of her debilitating—nearly fatal—marriage, as she watched the man she loved spiral into a drug-induced, manic and often violent haze. She writes of how he forced her to visit sex clubs and watch him have relations with strange women in their own home. Allard fell into despair so deep that she couldn’t imagine ever seeing the light again (“I knew I was in a dark well, one that I could not climb out of”). She eventually realized that she had to face all of her demons in order to truly heal. In this intense memoir, she shows how she managed to navigate the rocky road to her recovery.

A powerful story of a woman’s desperate hopelessness and her long, arduous trek back to herself.

5 Stars

Reviewed by Bobbie Grob for Readers' Favorite

Reckless: A Memoir by Rebecca Allard is not your every day memoir. This is not one of those books that makes a reader wonder when the book will get interesting; this book grabs the reader's attention in just a few pages and the suspense does not let up until the end. Rebecca met Al in 1975, and felt an immediate attraction to him, despite being a newlywed. As she is making her way through auditions and acting gigs to create a career for herself, the shadow of Al follows her around until she finally lets him into her life. There are many obstacles facing Rebecca and Al. Not only is she married with her own demons to face from her childhood and family, but Al is a recently paroled felon, a former drug user, and a black man. Reckless: A Memoir by Rebecca Allard is more than a tale of two people fighting for love. It is a tale of psychological suspense, abuse, and betrayal that spans decades. This book is brilliantly written and entirely captivating. It also shows exactly how a woman gets herself into an abusive relationship. Abusive relationships never start out that way; there is always a slow buildup until the victim is almost completely ensnared. Was Rebecca reckless in allowing this man into her life? Maybe, but throughout this story, we see how there are two sides to everyone, and nothing is black and white. I applaud the author for her courage and conviction and for putting herself out there in a way that could be useful to so many.