They say the best books don’t evoke one emotion, they open you up.
They make you curious and they make you smile, cry and laugh with recognition.
They make you empathise and they make you incredibly grateful that someone took the time to craft a world for you. Exit is one such book.
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In her memoir, Grizelda Grootboom, a former sex slave, discloses the often demonised world of prostitution, drug abuse and stripping.
She takes the reader through seedy clubs where women’s bodies are sold to the highest bidder; where the shape and size of her boobs and butt determine her worth, and where cocaine flows.
But Grootboom’s story does not begin there. Once she had a happy childhood, but her world fell apart when she lost her grandparents and her home.
Abandoned by her father and mother, at 8, she navigates the streets, finding herself and, most importantly trying to find her father, who she believed cared too much to abandon her.
Luck seems to be on her side when she finally locates her mother, with whom she had no prior relationship. But she is married to someone else and has no place for her.
And so begins the cycle of abuse. She is enslaved in what is supposed to be her home.
She explained “I had imagined that once I found my mother, I would go back to school.
“But life in my mother’s house soon became like hell. In that house cooking and cleaning became my enslavement. I was being kicked around and treated like a worthless being.”
Her life became a back and forth between the streets of Cape Town, her mother’s home in Khayelitsha and homeless shelters.
But her determination sees her attempt to break the cycle and make a better life of herself.
Her “saviour”, a friend from the streets, traffics her to Johannesburg as a sex slave. Hooked on drugs, destitute, and raped over two weeks, her survival instincts kick in although she falls deeper into the cycle of addiction and sex, to survive.
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She travels all over South Africa working, but a forced abortion and a devastating assault meted out by her former madame become opportunities for her to escape the only world she has known, the only job she has done.
She writes, “That day, seeing Summer’s tiny legs in the sink next to me made me feel like I was murdering someone.
That same evening I was told to take a client, while I was waiting, half-naked at the bar something in my aching gut said no, that was the day I said this is it.”
Grootboom details the pain of loss, abandonment, physical abuse and emotional emptiness.
She gives a rare glimpse into the underworld of drug addiction, prostitution and a glimmer of hope on her road to redemption.
The book is written in chronological order and with clarity, which makes it easy to follow and understand.
It logically transitions over three decades but the author’s raw emotion keeps the reader captivated, she takes you to every beating, to all the beds.
You will meet the clients and the pimps, the friends and foes and, ultimately, you will meet Grootboom and come to understand the tenacity that saw her through the devastating hardships that threatened to rob her of her humanity.
The book captures an atrocious life where decisions made by adults disastrously shape a young person’s life.
Read it to grow and feel and understand and empathise, to embrace and forgive.
Book: Exit! A True Story
Author: Grizelda Grootboom
Price: R249 (Loot.co.za)