Sometimes a potential reader is struck by the title of my book and wants to know what it means.. While I prefer the readers wait until page 72 to discover the answer, I’ll share the secret. The title is designed to provide a hook for reading the book. By the way, I think “Victims Make the Best Birdhouses” is a damn good hook. The best I’ve ever written. But here goes.
Victims Make the Best Birdhouses
Sometimes I think it would have been easier if I’d had cancer or another more socially acceptable disease. The physician would have shown my family an X-ray of my tumor and prescribed a course of treatment, giving them hope that they could openly share with their friends. Or maybe it would have been better if my wife had taken me to a hospital and said, “Something is wrong with my husband. He is depressed and having nightmares. He’s downright miserable.”
After performing a CT scan, the doctor might have said, “We’ve determined your husband’s problem. As you can see from the images, his soul is being strangled by massive adhesions. The different-colored adhesions represent a specific type of abuse, with the number of strains revealing the frequency. Look here, and you can see how the CT scan tells a story. The blue striations tell us your husband was sexually molested by his older brother. Based on the massive number of strains, we estimate his brother’s penis was rammed up his anus more than one thousand times.”
“Can anything be done to help him?”
“Oh, yes. He can be treated with medications and work with a psychologist who will help loosen the grip of the adhesions and terminate their growth. They can never be removed, but he can recover. However, he will likely become a different person from the one you know.”
“What if we don’t do anything?”
“Well, that’s an option,” the doctor might have said. “However, if you choose that option, you might as well cut a hole in his side, tie a rope around his neck, and hang him from a tree. It’s more humane. And untreated abuse victims make the best birdhouses.”