Review: "Unspeakable" by Jessica Willis Fisher

Unspeakable by Jessica Willis Fisher
Published November 2022 via Thomas Nelson
★★★

3.5 stars. Fisher grew up in a context that most of us can only imagine: her family was large, talented, and driven, and she was on stage—and then on TV—from a young age. But behind the picture-perfect front was something else that nobody wants to imagine: abuse that pervaded Fisher's earliest memories, that spread silently through her family, each affected daughter, or child, thinking it’s just me.

In Unspeakable, Fisher puts to words all those things that she couldn’t say for years and years, things that were hidden behind a veneer of religion and smiles and, yes, a TLC show. And it is a complicated story: family trauma, money, and abuse that nobody around them wanted to see. I looked up a couple of old performances after reading this, and it's jarring to think about what Fisher and her siblings—some of them very young children—faced when they got off the stage and could wipe their performance-ready smiles off their faces. Jarring and terribly, terribly sad.

It sounds like some of the complicated parts of the story continue. Even before her father's crimes became public knowledge, Fisher was semi-estranged from her family; I watched, too, some interviews that the other older siblings gave after the fact, and it sounds like they are still trying to put on a good face for the public but have extensive work to do behind the scenes to heal both individually and collectively. Fisher does not try to tell anyone else's story, and I would not be surprised if some of her siblings eventually choose to tell their own stories in similar form. Where Fisher goes from here remains to be seen, but it's a safe guess to say that there will be creative work involved.