The Bearer of Family Secrets: Yovi Survives Childhood Abandonment and Emotional-Sexual Abuse

The Bearer of Family Secrets is the true story of Yovinda Larraz, a remarkable girl born into a highly dysfunctional family living in postwar Holland. Surviving childhood abandonment and abuse, Yovi gradually comes into her own as a rebellious teenager exploring Amsterdam’s vibrant counterculture.

This honest and deeply revealing first-person account of Yovi’s tragic-comic youth depicts her struggle to resolve the mixed messages, dark secrets and conflicting morals of her early caregivers and family members. Oma, Yovi’s overbearing and controlling grandmother, her submissive but sexually adventurous mother, and Dirk, her mother’s pedophilic and voyeuristic live-in boyfriend, each make Yovi their secret confidant and influence her growth into womanhood. Faced with a no-win situation when her mother repeatedly ignores her complaints of sexual abuse, Yovi becomes the reluctant bearer of family secrets.

Yovi’s emotional life and self-esteem crashes at age eighteen after a painful double betrayal by her hero, Frank Zappa, and her sister. Emerging from a subsequent dark night of the soul, Yovi gains insight into a larger pattern of neglect and abuse, and realizes she must escape the merry-go-round of compulsive reenactment.

The Bearer of Family Secrets is also the story of three generations of women, exposing how daughters internalize their mother’s distorted perceptions and psychological patterns.

Through hardships and difficulties experienced in The Bearer of Family Secrets, Yovi develops the resiliency and survival skills to overcome the grave perils awaiting her in the second and third volumes of THE TALES OF YOVI.