Smith, Holly A. 1956-

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SMITH, Holly A. 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born 1956; married. Education: Attended Denver University School of Social Work.

ADDRESSES:

Office—c/o Author Mail, Brunner-Routledge, 29 West 35th St., New York, NY 10001.

CAREER:

Boulder County Sexual Abuse Team, Boulder, CO, began as case worker, became supervisor. Instructor, Naropa Institute.

WRITINGS:

Fire of the Five Hearts: A Memoir of Treating Incest, Brunner-Routledge (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Holly A. Smith took what she thought was a temporary job working with incest victims more than twenty years ago. Since then she has devoted herself to helping adults and children who have been sexually abused through her work as a supervisory social worker with the Boulder County Sexual Abuse Team. Smith recounts her experiences in this grueling environment in her book Fire of the Five Hearts: A Memoir of Treating Incest. The book reveals the difficult cases Smith has been called in upon and the emotional and physical toll her work takes on her. She is forthright in discussing her own anxiety attacks and paranoia brought on by the fact that she often must take children from their parents and send people to jail. Smith also describes abuse wreaked upon children and young adults in great detail, atrocious though it may seem to a general readership unacquainted with such crimes. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that Fire of the Five Hearts "can be added to the social worker's tool kit" because it presents both horror and hope for recovery.

In a review of Fire of the Five Hearts for Ralph Magazine, Lolita Lark wrote that the book "reeks of passion and love, some we would expect; some that comes out of left field." Lark added: "This is not so much an insider's account of incest and incesttreatment as it is the autobiography of a lover of the world who has somehow gotten caught in a very perverse job where people turn out to be unbelievably otherworldly.… Soon enough we realize that everyone here suffers some kind of violation—the children, the mothers, the fathers, the social workers, the society." Lark concluded that, for her work and her book, Smith "is brave beyond reason."