Daughter of Hostage Shares The Struggles of His Homecoming

Journalist Terry Anderson was one of the longest held American hostages in the Middle East, spending nearly seven years in captivity. But his release was not the happy ending everyone thought it was. His daughter Sulome reveals why, in her brutally honest book, “The Hostage’s Daughter.” She talks to Steve Adubato about her father’s homecoming and its emotional toll on her family and her life.

2/27/17 #2017

Excerpt:

"My name is Terry Anderson. I would like to send my thanks and those of my fellow prisoners, David Jacobsen and Tom Sutherland, to all those in America who are working and praying for our release. Wow. That was Terry Anderson. We'll talk about that in a second, but Sulome Anderson, author of The Hostage's Daughter, a powerful book. A Story of Family, Madness, and the Middle East. Your dad? For those who do not remember, the story... not the story, the reality, if you will, of Terry Anderson, seven years, captivity. Where? And when? In Lebanon. In Lebanon, he was kidnapped, 1985, three months before I was born. Three months before you were born? That's right. So as... at an early age, what did you know? I always knew. My mother never lied to me. Or... I mean I think she tried to shield me as much as possible, but like as far back as I can remember, I knew my father had been, you know, held against his will by bad men, and she would tell me that he was coming home soon. And you know, I recently came across a newspaper clipping from when I was two, so I don't even remember this. Apparently, I had told the reporter... They asked if I had a message for my father, and I said, "Please come home Daddy. Our hearts are breaking." Which is, you know, pretty intense for a two year old. Yeah. You know, I mean by the way, we're gonna... we're not gonna do justice to the power of this book, so go out and get it. But I want to ask you something. As I was reading through excerpts from the book, what struck me is that you had this intense desire to find your father's captors. Because? Well that was always the holy grail for me. When I started writing this book. I honestly... I got to a point where I didn't think it was gonna happen. You know, everything I reported would lead me into places where I was sort of bumping up against the captors. Like, people in the neighborhoods I would visit would say to me, "No we know where one of his kidnappers is. He lives in that house right there." Or, "Your father was held in that house." Because it's a small, sort of community, and at the time, most people knew what was happening. So I guess the reason I wanted to find them was because I had read my father's book..."