A former garda, Paul Moody – who began a relationship with Nicola Hanney in 2017, and is the father of her young son – was one of the first people in Ireland convicted of coercive control when it became a criminal offence in 2019. He was given a 3½-year prison sentence.
In this unputdownable survivor memoir, Hanney blows the whistle on the living hell she endured at the hands of Moody, who subjected her to brutal psychological, physical and sexual abuse over a four-year period. During that time, Hanney was undergoing treatment for cancer. Their son witnessed the abuse as a baby and a toddler.
Hanney’s struggle was made even more difficult because Moody exploited his power as a garda, intimidating friends and family members who tried to come to her aid.
While terms such as psychopathy, sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder are absent in Stronger, Moody’s character traits and behaviour, as described, are in keeping with extreme narcissism.
Expert bodies estimate that up to 6 per cent of the population falls into this dangerously disordered personality category. There is an urgent public safety need for compellingly truthful accounts of Moody’s style of insidious abuse; for much greater awareness of how narcissistic abusers operate to create mayhem, trauma, stress-induced illness and violent death in the people they target.
Books like Hanney’s on the school curriculum could teach young people the early red flags of abuse, and thus help them avoid entrapment. Those with exceptionally high levels of empathy – people who, like Hanney, tend to give the benefit of the doubt – could learn that they must be particularly vigilant, as they are especially vulnerable to being targeted by empathy-less people.
Several times during my white-knuckled read of Stronger, as I reached the peak of one of Moody’s explosive rage attacks, I noticed how fried my brain felt trying to comprehend his twisted verbiage of table-turning blame and accusation. I’d flick back over the pages I’d just read, looking for the perceived slight that sparked the most recent bombardment.
In this way, Stronger cleverly generates in the reader a disoriented psychological state, comparable to being narcissistically gaslighted.
“Why don’t they just leave?” is a question you won’t ask again, after reading Hanney’s brave and important book.
Adrienne Murphy is a critic
