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Bad as life was for Christina, it was worse for Chris. To smother his boyish spirits, Joan bought a "sleep safe," a harness-like gadget used to keep babies from rolling out of bed. Joan, however, had it modified for a growing boy and strapped Chris into bed every night until he was twelve. If he needed to go to the toilet, he had to call Joan, who was often not around, or persuade Christina to disobey orders and release him.
Throughout the book Christina maintains that she loved her mother, but it is a kind of love that sounds very much like hate. Chris, who is a $200-a-week electrical lineman on Long Island, knows exactly how he feels. "I hated the bitch," a Newsday reporter quotes him as saying. "I honestly to this day do not believe that she ever cared for me." He may very well be right; Joan disinherited both of her older children, leaving them out of an estate estimated at about $2 million. Chris and Christina are now challenging the will in court, claiming that their mother was a "habitual, heavy user of alcohol" who was confused by cancer when she wrote it. They further charge that their sister Cathy and her husband turned their mother against them.
For her part, Cathy, who lives in Allentown, Pa., says that she is "ashamed, heartbroken and disgusted" that the book was ever written. "Christina described my mother as everything horrible. It is so unbalanced! Maybe my relationship with my mother was good and Christina's was not. But I do know that my mother was not a monster."
Why did Christina not write her book when her mother was alive to defend herself? "The story was not yet finished," she replies, somewhat disingenuously. "I had no idea how it would end." Many of Joan's friends, some of whom confirm the basic facts of Christina's grim tale, are nonetheless sorry that it ended this way. "I cried when I read the book," says one of them, Screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass. "But I really cried for Joan. There is an absolute nausea among her friends in learning these things."