Disguised as a Man: Malachi Mart & Me Part I: The Encounter

This book is the first part of Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin & Me, originally published as one long book under the pseudonym, Sally Hawthorne. The longer book broke down naturally to a trilogy, so each more readable section is available now as Part I: The Encounter, Part II: Hostage to the Devil and Part III: Windswept House. The true story recounts the long love affair between the late Father Malachi Martin, a man whose reputation is, even now, notorious and enigmatic, and the author, who was nineteen when she first met Martin, who was nearly sixty. Part I recounts the author's discovery of and initial interest in Malachi Martin. She was still in high school at the time and, while she developed a crush on the author, she never expected anything to come of it. But she wrote to Martin and he wrote back. Coming from a background of severe abuse and neglect, the desperate teenager was flattered but, when she met him during her first college spring break, she was shocked by Martin's rapid attempts to seduce her body as well as her mind. With no prior amorous experience, and very little kindness or care in her past, she felt obliged to submit to Martin's attentions and willingly believed his promises to make her his one and only love, provided that she find a way to be in New York because "love requires presence." This false promise, along with countless others, set in motion a series of poor decisions that brought about the catastrophic consequences recounted in Part II: Hostage to the Devil All attempts at writing a genuine biography of Martin proved futile, for Malachi Martin was a master of confabulation. Instead, it became a memoir of infatuation, seduction, faith and its erosion, and what it means to tell the truth and to recover autonomy and integrity after…