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SPLIT: A Double Memoir
SPLIT is a starkly honest and moving double memoir about fear, survival, memory, and the power of truth. Told in the alternating voices of a father and daughter, it traces the decades-long fallout of a family fractured during the height of the 1980s Satanic Panic.
Jack (James Fan) came of age in rural Taiwan before his journey carried him across the ocean to America. In California, he built a life from nothing—only to see it splinter under the weight of false accusations and cultural hysteria.
His daughter, Ella (Lydia Knight), grew up fleeing shadows. Her childhood, marked by secrecy and terror, was spent running from a satanic cult she believed was being led by her father. Challenging the veracity of the cult was to fall prey to it, and could never be allowed. Years later, she confronts the figure she had been taught to fear the man who gave her life.
Through their braided narratives, SPLIT examines how courts, churches, and communities surrendered to a moral frenzy, and how prejudice and paranoia masqueraded as protection. The book moves beyond a tale of one family, revealing the generational scars left by a cultural hysteria that targeted anyone outside the dominant narrative.
Written with unflinching honesty and moments of piercing tenderness, SPLIT is both an intimate memoir and a broader reckoning with the lies fear can create. For readers of family histories, survivor narratives, and the literature of reconciliation, this is a haunting exploration of how memory fractures—and how truth, against all odds, can stitch it back together.
Jack (James Fan) came of age in rural Taiwan before his journey carried him across the ocean to America. In California, he built a life from nothing—only to see it splinter under the weight of false accusations and cultural hysteria.
His daughter, Ella (Lydia Knight), grew up fleeing shadows. Her childhood, marked by secrecy and terror, was spent running from a satanic cult she believed was being led by her father. Challenging the veracity of the cult was to fall prey to it, and could never be allowed. Years later, she confronts the figure she had been taught to fear the man who gave her life.
Through their braided narratives, SPLIT examines how courts, churches, and communities surrendered to a moral frenzy, and how prejudice and paranoia masqueraded as protection. The book moves beyond a tale of one family, revealing the generational scars left by a cultural hysteria that targeted anyone outside the dominant narrative.
Written with unflinching honesty and moments of piercing tenderness, SPLIT is both an intimate memoir and a broader reckoning with the lies fear can create. For readers of family histories, survivor narratives, and the literature of reconciliation, this is a haunting exploration of how memory fractures—and how truth, against all odds, can stitch it back together.
338 pages, Paperback
Published August 5, 2025
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