The words of an eight-year-old girl bounce along, covered in pink candyfloss, reading like the beginning of a school project.

"My name is Candice Derman. I am eight years old and I live in Johannesburg, South Africa. I like swimming parties, spare ribs and cats. My mom's getting remarried. I am so excited about my new dad. He gives me so much attention. The attention feels good when he's not touching me there. I am eight. I love my sisters, playing and puppies. I know it's wrong what he is doing. Tomorrow he will stop. I know it."

After receiving a copy of soapie actress Derman's autobiography, Indescribable: It's Easy to Keep a Bad Secret, I read the first few lines expecting to "leave it till tomorrow".

I couldn't.

Her words are spellbinding. It is not only the horrific story, but also her honest and eerily childlike words which evolve as she grows in the story, that spark fear for this child and a wanting to know she is going to be okay.

Writing in the voice of an eight, then nine, and later 10-year-old, the child's thoughts detail the horrendous sexual abuse at the hands of her beloved stepfather, and her coping methods of hiding in bubblegum ice creams, family holidays and movies.

Then the 11-year-old tells how he began raping her, continuing into her teens.

The painfully and often disgustingly detailed abuse is woven into the story of Derman's childhood: growing up in a leafy suburb with her wealthy family, who owned Porsches, a boat, and a holiday house at the Vaal Dam.

At 15, though, she is forced to admit the truth, tearing the happy family apart.

Derman says it was worth it.

"Abuse is like an unnatural disaster: everything that is lost must be re-built and I have had to re-build all of me. This book is part of that journey and is the story I thought I would never tell."

Meeting her, it is difficult to believe that this spunky yet peaceful woman went through what she did. But she says writing the book - and marrying a wonderful man 11 years ago - has healed her.

She wrote at coffee shops around Johannesburg, filling page after page in her handwriting for over two years.

"I was vomiting it out. I needed to do this, I could feel it in my body. So I would write, and not lift the pen until I was finished," she said.

"I couldn't write at home - that's my beautiful place with my husband, and I didn't want to soil that. And it was so emotional that I would write non-stop for a week, until my head was about to explode."

But the reader is left with questions: Why relive it now, nearly 20 years later, and how does she explain that disturbingly childlike prose?

"It is important, when you're living well, to tell the story of your trauma. I'm brave now because I have been there," she said.

As for the writing, she said: "The thing about abuse is that you grow up faster than normal, but you remain childlike. When I went back, I relived it like I was eight years old."

Derman is childlike in many ways, and plans to use this aspect of her personality to write children's stories - her next project.

For now, this child's story is one readers should prepare to be shocked by.

"I was able to do this now because I have become brave. It is about writing without ego, and telling the truth.

"I also didn't look up and think about being intellectual."

Apart from her own needs in writing this autobiography, Derman hopes to open some eyes and ears with it.

Her abuse went unnoticed for nearly a decade within her home.

"I want people to know that it can happen in the suburbs, in normal families. Also for the broken children . who need to know they are not alone," she said.

Derman can no longer be known as an actress. Indescribable outshines and outweighs anything she did in Generations or Scandal!

Derman is a writer. Thank goodness she has plenty more stories to tell.

• Indescribable: It's Easy to Keep a Bad Secret is available at book stores now for R175.

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