40 pages • 1 hour read
Jaycee DugardA Stolen Life: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 18-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 18-21 Summary
This summary section includes Chapter 18: “Birth of a Second Baby,” Chapter 19: “Raising the Girls in the Backyard,” Chapter 20: “Nancy Becomes ‘Mom,’” Chapter 21: “Pretending to Be a Family.”
On November 12, 1997, Jaycee goes into labor shortly before midnight. She walks across from “next door” to the “studio,” where Phillip and Nancy are asleep, pausing to marvel that she is free to move across the property. However, she knows the bonds that tie her to her captors are invisible. Her subsequent delivery goes smoothly, and Phillip chooses to call the new baby girl “Starlit.” Jaycee comments on Phillip’s belief that he’s cured of his sexual urges: “Phillip says that with God’s help he is coming to understand the voices that he hears, and God has cured him of his sexual problem. I will believe that when I see it” (102-03).
After the second baby arrives, Jaycee is given more freedom. During the day, Phillip is on the road because of business, but he uses a CB radio to keep in constant contact with his “family.”
Jaycee and Phillip have a dispute about sending the girls to school when they get older. She says, “For eighteen years I had been taught that schools are bad […] but when I consider who I heard all this stuff from, a kidnapper, rapist, pedophile, narcissistic, pervert, I can only come to one conclusion. Maybe school isn’t so bad after all!” (108).
The adult Jaycee can better assess all the lies that Phillip told her. “That was the confusing part—he could be an animal doing disgusting things to me one minute and then the next crying and asking for forgiveness. It confused the hell out of me. Now I know it was all a part of his manipulation” (111).
Luckily, Jaycee overrules Phillip on the subject of her daughters’ education. When they were little, they were home-schooled by her. Now, she is happy to report that both her daughters have attended high school and college, and she also realizes that she can’t protect her daughters from all of life’s dangers without imprisoning them too.
As the printing business grows, Nancy quits her day job to help out. Because she couldn’t have children of her own, she wants the girls to call her “Mom.” Jaycee agrees to this arrangement to keep everybody happy. After this point, she is known as the sister of her girls. Her new name is Allissa.
During this same time, Jaycee discovers that Phillip has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and manic depression. One of his therapists says that Phillip was self-medicating with methamphetamine, which gets him off the hook for dealing with his drug addiction. For her part, Jaycee believes that Phillip’s therapists do him more harm than good. She says, “I think one of Phillip’s therapists was an ‘enabling therapist’ who explained away why Phillip didn’t show up for appointments” (113). Rather than making him better, the doctors allow his destructive habits to continue.
In the years that follow, the little family begins to go on group outings. Jaycee fondly remembers a trip to the beach. She is even allowed to go and get her nails done with Nancy. This outing terrifies her because Phillip has convinced her that the outside world is full of horrible people who want to harm her: “One outing melted into the next. I learned to not look people in the eye. I felt if I did, they would ask me questions I couldn’t possibly answer. I stuck close to Nancy. I could feel my hands shaking when I reached out to touch something I wanted” (117).
Chapters 22-23 Summary
This summary section includes Chapter 22: “Cats,” Chapter 23: “Surviving.”
At this point in her narrative, Jaycee switches her focus to talk about all the cats that the family had at one time or another living in the large backyard. A few were killed by dogs, while others died of disease. Jaycee is emotionally devastated by each loss.
The rest of the chapter is devoted to journal entries that Jaycee wrote between 1998 and 2007. Most are random thoughts about the nature of her life. She says, “My heart is an organ in my body. My soul is me. People in my life have helped my soul grow and continue to grow. So many people do not listen to their soul” (126).
Most of her journal entries from this period express her longing to see her mother again, her fear of the terrible outside world, her frustration with Phillip’s control over her life, and her cowardice at not trying to free herself. She says that Phillip now blames most of his bad behavior on entities that he calls “the angels.” He never takes personal responsibility for anything. Jaycee seems to be waiting for something to change but doesn’t think that she has changed much herself. She resents her limited life and has grand aspirations of what she would do if she was free but is convinced that she is too weak to succeed on her own.
In the next chapter, Jaycee switches back to daily reality and describes the period after Phillip’s mother, Pat, takes a serious fall in the house. Pat is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and dementia. Jaycee and Nancy take turns watching over her. The old woman is mean to everyone except her son. Jaycee says, “I feel like she deep down hates me, though, and knows what I represent even though we have never told her, I think she knows I represent a side of her son that she doesn’t want to acknowledge exists” (145).
At the same time that the family is burdened with eldercare issues, the house has begun to deteriorate. The pipes are rotting. The sinks back up, and the washer and dryer need to be repaired. Phillip is already on edge because the authorities keep switching his parole officers, and they have been making more frequent visits to the house. During this period, Jaycee is living in a tent in the backyard.
Chapters 18-23 Analysis
In this sequence, we see the formation of a peculiar family unit clustered around Jaycee and her two daughters. Phillip makes improvements to the hidden back of the lot so that the captives can enjoy the outdoors and live in less spartan conditions indoors. He and Nancy interact almost continuously with the other three. Jaycee doesn’t spend much time describing her day-to-day activities during these years. Instead, she focuses on her many pets, some of whom died tragically. The reader is struck by her close emotional attachment both to her daughters and to her animals. Animals will loom large in her subsequent therapy and in the JAYC Foundation, but we see the roots of that attachment in these chapters.
Because of the journal entries incorporated into the memoir in this section, we also get better insight into Jaycee’s state of mind while she was writing down her random thoughts from 1998 to 2007. Her journal makes the reader aware of how greatly she fears the world and how powerless she feels to change her fate. Surprisingly, Jaycee rarely lapses into fits of despair. Most of the time, she envisions a future when she can travel the world and reunite with her real family. Perhaps these flights of fancy provide hope that acts as a counterbalance to Phillip’s corrosive influence over her mind.
For his part, Phillip is growing more delusional with each passing year. He has begun to hear disembodied voices that he will later attribute to malevolent angels. He also studies the Bible to find hidden messages in scripture. While this mania grows, his erratic interests lead him to start a printing business in the former “studio.” He even gets Jaycee to help him design printed material and lets her use a computer to get the work done. His hold over her mind is so complete that she doesn’t dare to send an email message to the authorities asking for help. He has convinced her that he has a way of monitoring all her communications. Jaycee has internalized a sense of his omnipotence to such a degree that she believes his ridiculous claims and stays metaphorically chained to her desk. This to her inexperience with the world as someone who has been locked away since childhood.
