Jilly says of herself: I've been so many people; some I didn't like at all. I wonder that anyone could.

Victim, hooker, junkie, liar, thief. But without them I wouldn't be who I am today.

I'm no one special, but I like who I am, lost childhood and all.

Most of "In the House of My Enemy" is about Jilly and her effort to establish her own self-worth. Her friend Sophie Etoilee, a fairylike woman, has helped her and has brought her into a group of artists who are working to put on an exhibition depicting the darker side of growing up. One of Sophie's engravings is Stolen Childhood, a symbolic depiction of "A child in a ragged dress" holding a stick doll, with "A shadowed figure" standing "behind the screen door, watching her." That symbolic child could be Jilly, who had a childhood...