Yes, A Stolen Life Is Banned!

In 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was snatched from a bus stop in South Lake Tahoe, California. She was held captive by Phillip Garrido for eighteen years, during which she was assaulted repeatedly and bore two children. A Stolen Life, published in 2011, is Dugard’s own account of those years, written in her voice without a ghostwriter. The memoir is raw, nonlinear, and sometimes hard to read, not because of lurid detail but because of the mundane horror of captivity: the routines, the isolation, the psychological manipulation that kept her from running even when she could have.

A Stolen Life was challenged 14 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans in Florida districts including Broward, Hillsborough, Orange, Palm Beach, Pasco, and Pinellas County. The challenges cite descriptions of sexual abuse and content deemed inappropriate for school libraries. The book is a survivor’s memoir, written by the survivor herself, about a crime that made national headlines. Removing it from school shelves doesn’t protect students from the reality of kidnapping and abuse; it just ensures they won’t encounter a firsthand account of survival and resilience. Dugard has said she wrote the book specifically so that others in similar situations would know they weren’t alone.