Memoir details childhood assault by Paper Bag Rapist

In her new memoir, Vancouver-based writer, author and playwright Carmen Aguirre details her rape at age 13 by serial sex offender John Horace Oughton, known as the Paper Bag Rapist.

But she said she didn't write Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution for personal catharsis.

“I would consider that journaling,” she said in a recent phone interview with NorthernLife.ca. “To me, that's not for public consumption. No, I write for universal experience. I don't write about traumatic events in my personal life unless I've done the healing around them, so that I'm not in conversation with my own personal pain.

“Rather I'm creating what I would consider a piece of art. If it's healing for others, that's great, absolutely. I didn't set out for it to do that. But if it does do that, that's certainly a plus.”

Although Mexican Hooker #1 has not yet hit bookstores, Aguirre said a lot of people have come forward to share their own stories of sexual assault after reading promotional articles about the book.

Aguirre, whose first memoir, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, won CBC Canada Reads in 2012, speaks about her new book in Sudbury on April 13 as part of the annual Celebrate Women event.

The rape that would mark the rest of her life happened April 26, 1981, when Aguirre and her 12-year-old cousin, Macarena, were sharing an illicit cigarette on a wooded trail near their school in Vancouver.

A man shoved them to the ground, holding them at gunpoint, telling Aguirre she had to make love to him or he'd kill them.

Their attacker was Oughton, a serial offender who sexually assaulted nearly 200 victims, many of them children, before he was captured in 1985.

He was called the Paper Bag Rapist because he often put paper bags over his victims' faces.

“I didn’t know yet one doesn’t get over childhood rape, one simply learns how to integrate it,” Aguirre wrote in Mexican Hooker #1.

She stresses, though, the memoir isn't just a rape story.

“That's just one of many stories in the book,” Aguirre said, adding it even includes some funny stories.

The book speaks about her journey to find her voice as an actor — Aguirre is a multiple award-winning theatre artist — and her fight against the stereotypes applied to her as a Latina woman in North America.

Aguirre's life has been nothing if not interesting.

Something Fierce, released in 2011, was a memoir of her childhood, which she spent moving around regularly with her parents, who were part of the Chilean resistance against Augusto Pinochet.

The fact that the book won Canada Reads was a “huge, wonderful surprise,” she said. “It enabled the book to hit the mainstream, so a lot of people who otherwise would not have heard about the book or would not have been interested in it picked it up and read it, which is every writer's dream.”

Celebrate Women, which features a different female Canadian author every year, is put on by the Canadian Federation of University Women Sudbury, YWCA and the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF).

Funds raised support services and scholarships for women.

The event takes place starting at 7:30 p.m. at Laurentian University's Fraser Auditorium. A reception and book signing to follow.
Tickets are $10, and are available at Gloria's and Apollo restaurants, the LU bookstore and at the door.

Go to our Facebook page for a chance to win a copy of Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution and two tickets to the Celebrate Women event.