Book provides therapy; Author survived years of abuse.

Byline: Ellie Oleson

Former Auburn resident Penelope Van Buskirk lived through 18 years of "a very violent marriage," and has written a book she hopes could help other abused women survive.

Ms. Van Buskirk is originally from New Jersey, where she was the eldest child and older twin in a stable, middle-class family of five children. Her father, Luke Thorington, invented a vastly improved mercury vapor lamp that is still used to light highways around the world.

"My dad was a highly successful engineer who worked for Westinghouse. He was a very stern man, but not at all abusive. My mother, Claudia, was very submissive," she said.

She graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a bachelor's degree in English and had plans to become a writer.

In 1967, she was happily engaged and working in a drugstore when a handsome young Army sergeant walked into her life.

"There he was, Mr. Bronze Star, a Vietnam veteran. It was like a fairy tale. We fell in love immediately. My parents were shocked when I changed the name of the groom one month before the wedding," she said.

Her husband was assigned to the Pentagon, so the newlyweds moved to Manassas, Va.

"Six months after our marriage, he slapped me. I slapped him back, and he apologized," she said. She had no idea that this was just the beginning.

Her fairy tale slowly turned into a horror story.

"His violence escalated after he left the military, then he started dating other women," she said.

The only time she said she was safe from verbal and physical abuse was during pregnancy with their two daughters.

Like many abusers, her husband's manipulative methods and seemingly sincere apologies worked, she said.

"Like the nursery rhyme, when he was good, he was wonderful, but when he was bad, he was horrid. But I loved him.

"He never touched the kids, and didn't think they saw anything, but, of course, they did. I just wanted out, but I felt caught in a trap. In those days, there was little help for abused wives."

At the time, abusive behavior within a marriage was kept secret and considered a private matter, she said.

It wasn't until the late 1970s that women's shelters became widely available for victims of domestic violence, and it was decades before then-Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990. It was not signed into federal law until 1994.

In 1973, the insurance company Mr. Van Buskirk worked for transferred him to Massachusetts, and the couple and their...