I finished Sarma Melngailis’s memoir The Girl with the Duck Tattoo, and it’s so sad. I feel terrible for this poor woman. She got married to a gambler who conned millions of dollars out of her. She robbed her own business to give this loser money so he could gamble it away. She defrauded friends. Lost everything, ended up in jail, and will be saddled with millions of dollars in debt forever.
And even after writing a 700-page memoir about all this, she has zero insight into why it all happened. The narrative is completely flat. It never goes deeper than an enumeration of money withdrawals she made in response to the conman’s badgering. Sarma is utterly mystified by her own actions. It is as if the possibility that effects might be connected to causes never crossed her mind. She has no family and no longer owns a business. One wonders what it is that she does all day that the possibility of analyzing her own motivations never occurs to her.
This is a sad, sad story. At times, the details of Sarma’s degradation are painful to read. But she learned absolutely nothing whatsoever and doesn’t seem to know there might be anything to learn.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Some people cannot be taught.” Aristotle
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“She has no family…”
That entire story made no sense until you added that. Her family might not have been able to stop her destructive behavior, but some would most likely attempt to intervene.
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She has a family–if you have watched the bad vegan documentary they do appear on camera there. Her husband got money from her mother. Her sister and her dad also appear in the documentary. If her memoir gives the impression that she doesn’t have a family, then that is even more bizarre.
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Sarma’s parents divorced when Sarma was 9, found new partners, and pretty much abandoned her. She was sexually molested for years by an adult pedophile starting at age 14. She started drinking alcohol at 13. She took LSD as a preteen. The parents were not around and didn’t care. In adulthood, she begged for crumbs of their attention and they treated her like garbage.
The only life-affirming, positive part of the memoir is when the conman swindled the evil mom out of $400,000. It’s massively deserved.
I hope nobody thought that Sarma could have become what she did without huge efforts on her parents’ part. There was no family there since she was a very young child.
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There are no words to describe how much I despise this kind of parents. Horrible, despicable trash.
Of course, I’m not saying this justifies Sarma’s shitty behavior as an adult. She had money and time aplenty to repair the damage these freaks caused her. She chose not to do that. The consequences are her fault.
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And by the way, Sarma’s parents aren’t indigent trailer park dwellers. These are rich people. The Dad is a college professor. They truly have no excuse to be such extreme shits.
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When I grew up divorce was difficult considered shameful, and a personal failure. The upper middle class and upper class are still to some extent somewhat immune to family break down, but only because they tend to marry within their cohorts. For others, divorce tends to run for generations because the children do not observe and learn normal healthy parental behavior. Are you certain that Sarma’s parents were not themselves the product of family breakdown?
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