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22 Oct 2025

Memoir of a survivor - Sarah Corbett Lynch opens up about trauma, healing, and her fight for the truth

In a powerful account, the teenager reveals the painful truth of her grief and childhood

 Memoir of a survivor - Sarah Corbett Lynch opens up about trauma, healing, and her fight for the truth

Sarah Corbett Lynch, author of A Time for Truth, shares her powerful story of overcoming childhood trauma, reclaiming her voice, and honouring her father’s memory

IN her deeply personal memoir, ‘A Time for Truth’, Sarah Corbett Lynch, aged 18, courageously shares the story of her father Jason Corbett's untimely death and the emotional and psychological abuse that marked her childhood. The powerful account sheds light not only on the grief and challenges she faced after the tragic loss but also on the years of manipulation and control that tainted her upbringing.

For Sarah, writing the book was a way to reclaim her voice after feeling silenced by both her family’s tragedy and the justice system. “I wrote the book because I felt like I had no voice,” Sarah explained.

“I wanted to tell the truth about my dad because the Martens had changed his truth and changed his life and made him out to be a person that he wasn't and I wanted people to understand the truth of what happened inside of our house because it wasn't just the day my dad was killed. There was a lot more to the story.”

Recalling moments of intense abuse, she reflects on the toll it took on her and her family, explaining how Molly Martens — the woman responsible for her father's death — manipulated her and her brother Jack into carrying out actions that, in hindsight, they would never have chosen. The emotional weight of such realisations was not easy to process.

“I think it's really lifted a weight off my chest because I lied,” stated Sarah. “I did lie for Molly, and she is free now because she used that lie as evidence to get away with killing my dad and this is only three days after she beat my dad to death.”

Speaking about the cathartic process of writing her memoir, Sarah said: “It was difficult to relive some of the experiences that I had, all over again, but I think it's been overall really helpful to me being able to tell the truth.”

The Limerick woman explained: “I had to write all of the most traumatic things that have happened in my life in one text, and that was a struggle. I found that extremely difficult, but it was also nice to be able to go through everything that happened to me and process each of them individually.” Since

Sarah wrote the memoir, she has noticed that she hasn't been as upset. The most challenging part of the process was ensuring that the memory of her father Jason - who was from Janesboro in the city - was accurately represented. Sarah said it's extremely important that people understand that her dad was a normal person.

“He was a dad that would make Friday night burgers for me and my brother because it was our favourite thing, and let us flip the burgers. He taught Jack how to cycle a bike. He taught me how to hit my first ball in baseball.”

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Sarah described her dad as being like everyone else's father. “My dad was also my soccer coach, my baseball coach, the guy who read me my bedtime stories.”

By sharing her experiences with emotional abuse and her journey to reclaim her voice, Sarah hopes to empower others facing similar struggles. “Everyone has their own voice,” she said. “You have a voice, and you have every right to tell your story your way.”

Her memoir grapples with the devastating impact of control and manipulation but also offers hope. “There was a lot of things that I had to unlearn from Molly. She taught me how to make myself sick so that I (could) manage my weight when I was six or seven.

“She told me to spy on my dad and visitors who came over and there was no reason for any of these things, so she taught me how to steal... It significantly impacted me,” added Sarah.

Looking to the future, Sarah hopes ‘A Time for Truth’ will help children and teenagers to understand their childhood in a more complex way. “Life is very complicated, but, you have to imagine for me, a child at the time, I didn't know that I was being abused, and my abuse wasn't recognised by anyone really other than my family.”

She said coercive control isn't recognised in the USA and hopes the memoir will shed a light on the signs of this persistent pattern of controlling and threatening behaviour. “I do hope that I get the chances that I am lucky to get in Ireland, in other countries as well, to be able to speak out against coercive control.”

At just 13 years old, Sarah wrote an illustrated book, ‘Noodle Loses Dad’ to help children cope with bereavement and loss. It was later adopted by children's right groups, counselling services, and schools as a valuable teaching aid.

“What I realised is that nobody talks to kids about abuse or about your parents dying or death in general,” explained the young author. “I wanted other kids to be able to have that conversation with their parents. I wanted schools to talk about it because death is a part of life.

“If an adult is grieving, they shouldn't think that a child isn't grieving or that they don't understand what's going on because even if we don't understand exactly what's going on, we still feel it and those feelings are absolutely valid and should be recognised.”

Sarah's own mother Margaret (Mags) Fitzpatrick died tragically when she was twelve weeks old and, later, when Sarah was four, her family moved to the US and her father remarried. Sarah and her older brother Jack were left orphaned when their father, Jason, was killed by their stepmother, Molly Martens, and her father, Tom Martens, in August 2015.

Sarah and Jack then returned to Ireland to be raised by Jason's sister, Tracey, and her husband, Dave. This tragic loss instilled in Sarah a burning desire to campaign for other bereaved children and for victims' rights and to help others impacted by violent crime, which she has actively done in the US and Ireland in the years since.

‘A Time for Truth’ by Sarah Corbett Lynch was published by Hachette Books Ireland in Trade Paperback. Sarah will launch her book in O’Mahony’s Bookshop on O’Connell St in the city centre on Thursday, March 6 at 6.30pm. All are welcome to attend the event.

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