Susan Weber Svoboda’s first book entitled A Bully in the Closet

Memoirs of a Golf Widow is a story of her life. As a young girl she was very cute, smart, a tomboy and curious about the world around her. She had a scientific outlook on life and was anxious to discover the truth. She was forever coming up with theories about how to solve problems. Her first interest was to understand why so many people in her immediate circle suffered from mental illnesses. Her Aunt Ruth in particular was constantly being hospitalized, given shock treatments, and medicated. Sue’s theory was that if Aunt Ruth could get free of her mother, mother-in-law and husband all of whom were very controlling and was let to resume the operation of the Dance School she had founded as a young woman that she would be fine. In 1985 after being on a contraindicated drug by a young doctor in Dream Lake she found herself in a mental hospital which to her seemed like a perfect place to test her theory about her Aunt Ruth. She befriended a number of patients and noted that each of them seemed fine until a parent or spouse visited. They were all under the control of a person who should have been in a fiduciary relationship with them but who were overstepping their boundaries making these otherwise docile people crazy. Her childhood theories about Aunt Ruth’s illness were validated.

The second theory she developed was about why people who were otherwise fine had a great deal of difficulty reading. Her father, sister, niece, nephew and son, Andrew were all dyslexic. Her father, Emil, gave her a 100 year old stereoscope and showed her how you could use it to see what a person with a perfectly balanced mind would see images and mirror images which were superimposed when they attempted to decipher two-dimensional letters. All these family members had a terrible time in school. Her theory was to develop glasses that would block the mirror image in their right brains so they could see only the image in their left brains when wearing them. She is still involved in testing these glasses. Then she wanted to know why people had different colored skins. She wrote a paper called the Color Diminution Theory of Human Migration in which she posits that Africans are the parents of the human race and demonstrated how because of discrimination you can trace the different skin colors around the world. This theory is explained in her book. While in the mental hospital she discovered how by placing her thumbs on her temples and letting her fingers roam freely around her brain she could defuse the rapidly firing synapses in her brain without the use of electric shock therapy. There are a number of stories in her book about methods she used to recover her mental health after living for 17 years with a misogynistic, misopedist sociopath. She wrote her autobiography with the hope of encouraging young people to avoid the traps she fell into which caused her and her children so much pain. Keep an open mind and enjoy the read!!