"Dramatic, graphic and wrenching...The reader is left to wonder--at the devastation of Carcaterra's youth, at his survival to adulthood, and at the grace that allowed him to craft this piercing memoir."
THE WASHINGTON POST
Lorenza Carcaterra grew up in Hell's Kitchen, New York in the 1950s and '60s in a confusing world of love and fear of his paradoxically violent and affectionate father. Then Lorenzo learned that his father had murdered his first wife. And he wondered how he could love his father again. Did he possess the same murderous fury; would he someday suddenly lash out at those he loved? As his father's physical abuse escalated, Lorenzo sought frantically for a safe place...a place where he could find hope and reconciliation and peace, where his father's terrible shadow no longer lingered. Now, decades later, Lorenzo has finally come to terms with the awful truth about his father. A SAFE PLACE is the brilliant result.

Veteran newspaper and magazine reporter Lorenzo Carcaterra has seen a lot of man's inhumanity. But not until he had the courage to write about his own abusive family in Life magazine did he fully realize he was himself a victim of it. A Safe Place is a dramatic portrait of a family whose vitality was its tragic flaw; and a chroncile of a son's journey to positive self-worth.