Ellen Sussman was raped as a teenager, and it shaped the way she raised her daughters. But, she tells Kira Cochrane, she wanted them to be fearless

As her daughters were growing up, Ellen Sussman gave them the expected talks about safety. She advised them to carry themselves proudly, to keep their wits about them and hold their keys with the prong facing outwards, in case they ever had to be used for protection. But in one important respect, the discussion remained abstract. It was never specified what the shadowy figure running through the conversation might want, beyond, say, a grabbed handbag. To casually mention rape made Sussman feel like a liar. She knew if the subject arose she'd have to tell her daughters her own story, and she had no idea how, or when, to broach it.

I meet Sussman on a bright day, at a preposterously beautiful location – a restored 14th-century castle overlooking the bay of Cannes where she is finishing a writing residency. She is a warm, attractive woman of 57, a highly successful novelist, in a blissful second marriage, her life having always played out on a grand scale, she says. It came close to ending 40 years ago, when she lay in a field, beaten and bleeding, her eyes tightly closed, wondering if she was dead. The attack that day would change Sussman's sense of herself and also significantly shape the way she parented her daughters, who were born more than a decade later.

Today, Sussman is self-contained and confident, a fact she traces directly to her childhood. She grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, with parents who came from poor, immigrant Jewish families, who had an absolute belief in their ability to survive. "My mother's life had been very hard," she says, "and she'd always say, 'we were poor, we came over on the boat [from Russia], we didn't speak English, but I'm a survivor, and you kids will be survivors too.'"

Sussman was academic, seriously sporty, and quite rebellious as a child. She grew up feeling invincible, she says. And she tried to pass this outlook on to her daughters. "When I was raising them, if we were going somewhere and there was a sign that said 'do not enter', I'd say, 'come on, we'll sneak around the back.'" She hoped to make them fearless. "I didn't want them to have that anxiety that eventually keeps you from having real relationships with men, that keeps you too scared to do anything. I didn't want them to grow up and choose the safe man, the safe life."

This was what Sussman herself had done, in the years after being attacked, marrying the man who fathered her daughters when she was in her mid-20s. It was a good marriage for many years, she says, but in retrospect he was "very safe and conservative, and it became clear to me that there wasn't a lot of passion. I think maybe that was because I was scared. It was as if on some very subconscious level I was thinking, if I go out into the world again, if I do brave, daring things, I'm going to get into trouble."

She was determined that her daughters would never feel like this, and so, as they grew up, she always tried to hide any concerns she might have about their safety. When her older daughter reached puberty, Sussman noticed men glancing at her, and felt a brief urge to dress her in the kind of big, baggy shirts she'd worn after the attack. She resisted. Her daughters are now 23 and 25, and when one of them wanted to move to a slightly shady neighbourhood, she told them to check out the area, but kept her concerns to herself. "They're both living in neighbourhoods that might not be entirely safe now, but I'm glad. If they were choosing to live close to Mom, I might sleep better, but that's not what I want for them. I want them to be willing to take those risks."

Her own confidence had taken a serious hit in her mid-teens when her father died of cancer, at the age of 53. But she had recovered a little by the time she went to college. At Tufts, near Boston, she says she loved her studies, loved living in a dorm with other kids, and met her first serious boyfriend, a medical student four years her senior. When college ended for the summer, Sussman set off on her own to travel and work abroad. She doesn't want to specify the country, or the organisation she worked with, for fear of putting other people off.

One day, while out working in the fields with an American boy, two local men approached with clubs, and began provoking them. The threats escalated, and the boy suggested they start running in a specific direction – when she agreed and set off, he ran the opposite way and hid, having apparently calculated, quite correctly, that she was their obvious target.

The two local men chased her, caught up, and both raped her. "When I struggled," she says, "they beat me. The way I survived was I pretended I'd died. I let out a last scream, and went limp. They tried to pull me across the field, and I was literally a dead weight. So they took off."

She lay wondering if she was actually dead. "I wouldn't open my eyes, because I was scared they were still there. And I also didn't know if I wanted to be alive. I couldn't smell anything, or hear anything. My senses were done. All I had was my mind, and I was thinking, 'why won't that stop?' And then I finally made a decision to open my eyes. When I did it was astounding to me that I wasn't in pain, because I was beaten and bleeding."

Sussman eventually found her way back to her lodgings, went to hospital and made a complaint to the police; the men were caught almost immediately, and she agreed to stay in the country for a week, no more, to testify against them in court. Her mother didn't come, which she now finds astonishing, but she puts this down to a generational difference, a background in which it was highly unusual to travel abroad. The men were convicted, and received a 15-year sentence. She later heard that they were let out after two years.

On her return to the US, she was a mess, lying in bed all day, not wanting to go out. Her mother had been incredibly upset when Sussman first called and told her, but soon instructed her to tell no one. "She would say, 'No boy is ever going to love you if he knows.'" The pair shuttled back and forth to Sussman's doctor's appointments; a round of injections to test for, and prevent, sexual diseases (thankfully all were negative). "I hadn't even graduated to an adult doctor, so my mother was driving me to my paediatrician, and he's shooting into my ass these big shots for gonorrhoea." Then one night, at dinner, her mother asked if she'd been a virgin before the attack. "I said no, I had made love with my boyfriend, and she said, good. And I thought that was lovely. I understood exactly what she meant. And that might have been the only time she talked about it."

At a teacher's urging, Sussman agreed to go back to college, and with the help of the burgeoning women's movement, she grew stronger. She joined a support group, where she met women who had also been attacked, mostly long before she had, and began thinking, "they survived, and I'll survive". She volunteered at a rape hotline, started a rape crisis centre on campus, then a general women's centre. Slowly, the work brought her out of herself. She began to recover.

In her early 30s she had her two daughters, and 10 years later she met her second husband, the man she describes as her best friend and soulmate. Then, as she was nearing the publication of her first novel, On a Night Like This, in 2004, she had a conversation with her editor about her book tour. The key question audience members always ask, she was told, was whether a novel was autobiographical. As hers included a character who had been raped at 18, she needed to think carefully about her answer. "I thought, my God, my girls don't know that story," she says. "If I was going to tell the truth, I had to tell them."

The fact she hadn't shared this already, took her slightly by surprise. For a long time, says Sussman, she had felt it essential to tell the story to anyone who wanted to understand her properly. She started unpicking the reasons, and realised that telling her daughters had always run counter to how she'd parented them. She had always been their protector, she says, "and I was worried they would either see me as weaker or think, if this could happen to me, it could happen to them".

Her daughters were 15 and 17 – almost her age at the time of the attack – and she realised she had to tell them. She started with her older daughter, Gillian, a cerebral, sensitive girl. "I sat on her bed, and told her everything. She cried, she was very quiet, and it wasn't until later that she began asking the occasional question." Sussman then took her younger daughter, Sophie, out for a hike. "She's very much a mover, a doer, and that meant she didn't have to look at me, because we were walking. I told her, and she was also very quiet – I think it bothered her that I had never told her. Why had I waited so long? That might have been her only question. And I said I was always just waiting for the right time, and I didn't want her to be scared by it."

To this end, she spent a long time explaining how she grew stronger again. "I didn't lie about how hard it was, but I put a lot of emphasis on how I took control. I think my message was: I was broken, and I fixed it. This happened, it tore me apart, and I figured out ways to make myself strong and healthy again, so I wasn't ruined by it."

Sussman and her daughters had always been close, but the conversation was a turning point. It allowed them to see her properly as a woman, she says, rather than just an all-powerful parent. "It made me seem a little more vulnerable. Before that, my girls might have had a problem with the fact that I seemed too tough, too strong. My strength was a little intimidating. And telling them about something that happened to me that was really hard, and that I had a hard time getting over, brings me back to scale. After that, it was suddenly more like talking woman to woman, instead of mother to daughter."

She could scarcely have told her daughters a stronger story. As Sussman sits overlooking the bay, her second novel, French Lessons, having recently become a bestseller, her third just finished, her fourth on its way, she shows that it's possible not just to overcome horror, but to vanquish it. "That was the key message, ultimately," she says. "I was able to tell my daughters that it's more important to have the skills to make things better than it is to have a perfect life. Because the perfect life just doesn't exist."

•French Lessons by Ellen Sussman is published by Corsair

{loadposition user38} source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/nov/19/rape-telling-daughters-ellen-sussman

source: http://www.europerank.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/58236-i-had-to-tell-them