Last month, Dave Pelzer took his six-year-old grandson, SJ, to play at a pumpkin patch. ‘We went down a ‘super-super’ slide, on a toy train, then SJ fed the pets,’ says Pelzer, talking over Zoom from his home in Guerneville – a small former logging town in California near where he was born. ‘When we got home, my son Stephen – SJ’s father – asked me, “Were you this full of energy at the age of six?”’ Pelzer turned to his son and said, ‘Remember: I was living in a basement.’ He describes how the two of them laughed at this ‘off-colour joke’.
Pelzer, 64, is the author of the bestselling memoir A Child Called ‘It’, which marks 30 years since publication this year. As the book details, not only was Pelzer forced to live in the basement garage by Catherine Roerva Pelzer, his alcoholic and abusive mother, he was stabbed with a cooking knife; starved; made to wear the same smelly, ragged clothes every day; forced to lie in ice cold baths for hours; and, in one horrendous episode, made to eat his own vomit.
His mother refused to call him Dave, instead she called him ‘It’.
Dave Pelzer was forced to live in the basement garage by Catherine Roerva Pelzer, his alcoholic and abusive mother
Pelzer was the second-eldest of five boys and became the target of their mother’s sadism. His other brothers were initially spared – he has said before that he does not know why his mother chose him as her victim. Meanwhile, his father, a fireman called Stephen, was often absent from their home in Daly City, California. And when he was present he did nothing to stop the torture. (In the book, Pelzer describes his mother stabbing him and his father – who also drank heavily – sitting in the next room reading the newspaper.)
The abuse started when Pelzer was four, when his mother’s drinking problem worsened. It only ended when his teachers staged an intervention and he was removed to foster care aged 12. In 1970s America, child-abuse laws were largely ineffective; neither of Pelzer’s parents faced criminal charges and his brothers remained in the family home.
After he was put into foster care, Pelzer rarely saw his mother again but, as an adult, he did try to reconnect with his father. (In 1980, Stephen died of lung cancer and in 1992 Catherine died of an unconfirmed heart attack.)
A Child Called ‘It’ was published in 1995 when Pelzer was 34 and the memoir, initially released in the US, was a gigantic hit. Pelzer appeared on Oprah and his book was on The New York Times bestseller list for six years. When it was published in the UK in 2000, it shot to number one in the bestseller lists and stayed there. By 2008, it had sold more than a million copies in Britain alone.
Pelzer, who served in the US Air Force for 13 years before becoming an author, has since written eight further books about his childhood and the aftermath. He volunteers at his local fire department, but writing plus book royalties are presumably how he makes most of his living. That and public speaking. In 2004, at the height of Pelzer’s literary success, it was reported that his appearance could cost $7,000 (£5,300) or more. Today, one website lists his in-person speech fee at upwards of $10,000 (£7,500).
Pelzer also speaks at children’s institutes for free. Last Friday, he says, he spent two hours talking to neglected and abused pupils at a local high school. ‘I see myself as an uncle/cheerleader. I tell them that despite adversity you can achieve anything.’
Pelzer turns 65 later this month – he won’t share the exact date. Considering he has made a career talking about his childhood, Pelzer is private about the oddest things (his siblings and ex-wives go by pseudonyms). He says he celebrates two birthdays, one on the day he was born and the other on what he terms his ‘Rescue Day’ on March 5, 1973. ‘I honestly believe if they hadn’t taken me away from my mother, she would have killed me.’
It took him 20 years to write A Child Called ‘It’. ‘The book was initially to say thank you to my teachers for protecting me,’ he says. Particularly Mr Ziegler, who was instrumental in his rescue. Ziegler is still alive, but the pair are no longer in touch.
It took Pelzer, who turns 65 later this month, 20 years to write his memoir A Child Called ‘It’
Both of Pelzer’s parents were dead by the time his book was published, but its arrival fractured his family. ‘Some relationships did go by the wayside,’ he says, not wanting to be more specific. ‘But if you drop a bomb, you have to expect shockwaves.’
Of his four brothers, Pelzer is in touch with both his ‘very private’ older sibling, Ron, and his youngest Kenny. The latter was living with their mother into his 20s and was the person who found her when she died. ‘He was barely more than a toddler when I went into care. He didn’t know much about me,’ says Pelzer. ‘He was told that he had a brother called David who was taken away because he had a gun and burned down the school. Which was strange, but people swallowed it.’ The brothers had an emotional meeting in Kenny’s early teens.
His second younger brother, Richard, became the new subject of their mother’s abuse once Pelzer was in foster care; in 2005 he wrote his own book about the experience, A Brother’s Journey. In it, he claimed their mother beat him, made him wear filthy clothes, and poured entire bottles of Tabasco down his throat. In 2019, Richard took his own life.
His third brother, Stephen, is more complicated. In 2001, Stephen – who has Bell’s palsy – told reporters that Pelzer had exaggerated the extent of their mother’s abuse. At the same time, Pelzer’s grandmother said he was a ‘disruptive kid, only interested in himself, with ideas of grandeur’.
‘I am not about what happened per se,’ he said in a 2004 interview. ‘I use my story to qualify my message of resilience and responsibility. I almost feel at times that I have to prove, prove, prove. And at that point, what you see is what you get.’
Still, there’s no denying that Pelzer can be evasive. Ask a question he doesn’t like, and he benignly responds: ‘I’m afraid that’s private.’
Pelzer has been married three times. He divorced his first wife Patsy in 1994, before his book was published, then married his editor, Marsha, in 1995. When he and Marsha divorced in 2004, Pelzer told reporters that ‘there should be a rule that married people don’t work together’. Adding, ‘It’s not easy when your work takes you to the heart of darkness.’ He is currently single after his most recent marriage ended in 2019. He won’t divulge why they split, but says she is ‘a beautiful person’.
He had his only child, Stephen (39 and named after Pelzer’s father) with Patsy. He told his son about the abuse he’d suffered when Stephen was about eight and the pair – alongside Pelzer’s daughter-in-law Cyndel and his ‘force of nature’ grandchild SJ – are very close.
Today, Pelzer has forgiven his mother. ‘If I don’t, I am only killing myself,’ he says. In the past he has observed that, not only was his mother an alcoholic, she was also abused by her own mother. ‘It’s got to stop with me,’ he said.
His attitude towards his father is more ambiguous. He says he doesn’t forgive him: ‘My dad should have been a protector; he saw me stabbed and bleeding.’ Yet he named his son after his father and when Stephen Snr died he was being held in Pelzer’s arms.
Although Pelzer gives regular motivational talks at schools, he never reads from his own books. This is understandable. Most of A Child Called ‘It’ is brutal. In one chapter Pelzer describes his mother force-feeding him ammonia: ‘Mother rammed the cold spoon deep into my throat… a moment later I couldn’t breathe. My throat seized… The next morning while cleaning the bathroom, I looked in the mirror to inspect my burning tongue. Layers of flesh were scraped away.’
There were accusations in the British press that the book sold because its descriptions of violence were, as a Guardian piece puts it, ‘pornographic’. Pelzer’s first UK publisher, Trevor Dolby, disagrees. In September, Dolby wrote in the publishing journal BookBrunch: ‘At the height of the book’s popularity I was getting 20 or 30 letters a week addressed to “the publisher”. Most were anonymous, and began with thanks for publishing the book, followed by each writer’s own “Pelzer story”.’
The book was published in 1995 when Pelzer was 34 and the memoir, initially released in the US, was a gigantic hit
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Pelzer says he is not sure his book would be published today. ‘They are different times.’
He says he regrets not being around for his young son when the book took off. ‘I was on the road a lot. I’m also ashamed of my behaviour as a boy: for not rescuing my brothers [from my parents], for stealing my classmates’ food from their lunchboxes.’ (Because Pelzer’s mother starved him, he resorted to pilfering food from other students at school. He has said that when he was rescued into foster care he weighed less than five stone.)
For this reason, he has refused to reconnect with his schoolfriends. ‘I had the chance to meet one at a celebration 20 years after the book, but I couldn’t: I was too ashamed that I’d stolen from his lunchbox.’
How did Pelzer not go off the rails? ‘My mother gave me a gift; she made me want everything more,’ he says. ‘I am grateful for every day. The most important thing to me is to have clean sheets, since I was stabbed in the abdomen by my mother and bled over my bed. I now have “clean sheet Fridays” and nothing gives me greater pleasure.’
He also loves to cook. His mother seemingly left him one positive legacy: her recipe for ‘green pasta’, made with parsley and garlic. ‘Before she went koo-koo-kachu, my mother was an amazing cook.’
Pelzer’s plan for the future is ‘to be a good grandfather. I want to make a difference, talk to school kids, help homeless people: I still volunteer.’ For now, he is content. ‘How many people can say they wrote the number-one book in the world?’ he says. ‘Plus I have clean sheets once a week. What more could I want?’
