Lisa Nikolidakis’ memoir, “No One Crosses the Wolf,” contains a lot of mythology.
Greek mythology, of course, as the oldest child of an immigrant who complains of having to endure language and cultural immersion classes as a child, and later studies the stories of her father’s homeland as a college student.
But there’s also family mythology, too: The stories people tell themselves and others about the ones they love, trying to explain what seems inexplicable, wanting to believe something good, no matter the reality.
The mythology Nikolidakis mines from her family, for her family, is that of a loving father who emigrated from Crete to America, settled in South Jersey, and raised two children before dying tragically in a car accident. This is the story she hears from her father’s elderly sisters when she travels to his hometown, a story she lets them believe is true, even as her cousins listen skeptically.
The truth was far uglier, and far more tragic.
Nikolidakis’ father, Manoli, didn’t die in September 2003 in a car accident. Instead, he killed his live-in girlfriend and her 15-year-old daughter before turning the gun on himself in their Lindenwold home.
By the time of the murder-suicide, Nikolidakis was estranged from her father after years of emotional and sexual abuse. At 27, she hadn’t been in contact with him in years, but she was still horrified when she got the news that three bodies — it wasn’t immediately clear whose — were discovered, partially decomposed, in his home.
The phone call, she writes in the prologue, “cracked my world open.” Initially, her brother, who’d gone to the house to find it swarmed with police, thought their father had been murdered. He’d been working with their father, and had a much different relationship with him than his sister, a fact that complicated the siblings’ relationship.
“How many times had I wished my father dead?” Nikolidakis wondered. Still, she was shocked, numbed, woozy, unsure how to proceed, how to feel, what to tell her employer, her boyfriend, herself. Her brother told her that police advised the family not to watch the news, but she did anyway, and her father was the lead story.
Helicopters hovered over his yellow bungalow, and their shaky footage captured three covered gurneys taken from the house, but there was no word who they were. At the sight of the bodies, Nikolidakis let out a primal howl.
“For a long time I thought that howl was about the death itself,” she writes, “that even without confirmation, I knew in my body my father was gone. I told myself it was intuition, a familiar connection. Blood recognizes blood, like twins who feel each other’s pain from across the country. But that’s mythology, a bit of wishful wizardry.”
Instead, she was terrified her father might not be dead — that he might be alive and on the hunt for her. It took hours to find out that he had killed himself, but that didn’t bring any closure for Nikolidakis.
She spent years struggling with anxiety, depression, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks and self-destructive behavior.
Talking to the Courier-Post by phone from Houston, where she lives now, Nikolidakis is in a better place emotionally and mentally, but admits that it took years to get there. Writing the book was part of that process.
“The best place to begin is to tell you how long I worked on this book,” said the author, now 45. “It took 17 years. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote, which is not how I recommend working through trauma,” she added with a wry laugh.
“I began writing literally by hand the day after my father committed the murders. It was the only way I knew how to cope.”
The Rutgers-Camden and Highland High School grad began writing out of grief, and would put down the project, then start again.
“This kept poking at me, like unfinished business. And then it became necessary for me to finish it, and I think that it’s an important story, even if it was difficult for me to work on.”
Her mental and emotional health were also difficult to work on, she admitted, and those struggles take several chapters of her book.
“The thing about growing up in a repeatedly abusive environment, the lesson you learn early on, is that you’re on your own,” she said. “So I learned to solve my own problems, and the ‘easy’ things, like asking for help, are still incredibly difficult for me.”
She recognized, even when her father was still alive, that she wasn’t the only victim of his anger and aggression. Her mother endures abuse as well, and slowly works her way out of the marriage and into independence. Later, Nikolidakis and her brother, both grown, visit their father and his girlfriend; she meets her young son and teenage daughter who exhibits some of the signs of trauma Nikolidakis did as a teen. She sees some of herself in the girl, worries her father might also be abusing the girl, and reaches out with a kind gesture.
But she’s also relieved when the visit ends, and the first meeting with the future victims of her father’s rage are the last. A drunken phone call from her father, when he fails to recognize her voice, is the final straw for their relationship.
Finally, five years after the murders, after a string of failed relationships, after bartending and drinking, after enrolling in college and starting a career in academia and writing, Nikolidakis decided to go to Greece to reconnect with her aunts and their families, whom she’d last seen during their extended visits to the States when she was a child.
She was at a loss to explain why, though, even to herself.
“For me, my father was Greece and he was the last person I wanted to be connected to,” she writes. She rationalized the trip as perhaps a cultural reawakening after dating a Greek guy or visiting a Greek church festival, but it’s really something else.
“Fear had ruled my life, and even though I had panicked everywhere… I still got through most days intact,” she writes. “I realized I had a choice: I could accept my overwhelming fear as my life’s limitation, or I could fight it. I downed a shot of Jameson and bought the (plane) ticket.”
Nikolidakis looked at the trip as a quest — an odyssey — and that part of the book traces the writer’s mixed feelings about her father, her heritage, and the chasm between reality and mythology. The country is beautiful, the people kind and welcoming, the pain of her father’s memory in every village, over every hill.
She searches for belonging. She’s angry at her father for the trauma he inflicted on her, but realizes she still loves him. She longs for healing. She wants her aunts to know the truth but can’t bring herself to stain their memories of their beloved brother.
“(My aunt) had a story she believed, but she also deserved the truth,” she told the Courier-Post. “I remain ambivalent about it but there’s nothing to be done now.
“Family mythology comes with a level of difficulty, and it’s often not examined, not just in a Greek family, but any family that’s been through trauma in this way. We all have a mythological space we come from and I think we need to examine that, to render someone two-dimensionally.”
The book ends on a hopeful note, and Nikolidakis today seems to know her entire story is hopeful, too.
“Recovery and healing are not destinations, they’re ongoing,” she said. “I have done so much foundational trauma therapy. I have read every book on trauma and survival. I am in a good place in my life. I have a real solid foothold on my mental health. That doesn’t mean these moments don’t sneak up. But my refractory periods seems to get shorter and shorter. I spend a good deal more time helping other people with their trauma. My cup is really full.”
Her memoir, out Sept. 1, has garnered positive reviews from well-regarded authors and outlets including Kirkus, which called it “a brave and inspiring account of a movement through pain to a complex reckoning and self-recovery.”
As someone who’s written and studied the effects of trauma, Nikolidakis is hoping reliving hers will help others.
“I hope that readers come away from the book with a clearer understand of how abuse manifests in victims,” she said. “And if it makes a single survivor feel less alone, I have done my job.”
Phaedra Trethan has been a reporter and editor in South Jersey since 2007 and has covered Camden and surrounding areas since 2015, concentrating on issues relating to quality of life and social justice for the Courier-Post, Burlington County Times and The Daily Journal. She’s called South Jersey home since 1971. Contact her with feedback, news tips or questions at ptrethan@gannettnj.com, on Twitter @By_Phaedra, or by phone at 856.486-2417.
Help support local journalism with a digital subscription.
