The mother of two children killed by their father in a deliberate house fire has said she hopes her autobiography will “reach out” to victims of domestic abuse.
Claire Throssell’s sons, Paul and Jack, died alongside their father – Ms Throssell’s ex-husband – on an unsupervised parental visit to the home in Penistone in October 2014.
Her book, called For My Boys, is scheduled for release in October.
“It’s not healed anything, but I felt that I had to give a true, raw, honest account of what domestic abuse is like,” she said.
“People don’t realise when you live in abuse, it’s every second of every day.”
Ms Throssell and Darren Sykes had been divorced for two weeks when he lured the boys to the attic to play with trains he had bought them, before setting fires around the house.
He then barricaded them inside with him.
Paul and his father died in the house, while Jack was taken to hospital and died days later.
Ms Throssell has since campaigned to stop dangerous parents having unsafe access to their children, helping to pass the Domestic Abuse Act in 2011 and being awarded an MBE.
She said writing the book had been emotional, and she had used “countless boxes of tissues” and sometimes “couldn’t even see the page for tears”.
“There’s hundreds of books out there about how to wean [children], how to bring them up, and how to get them to sleep,” she said.
“No expert has ever written a book about how to live without your children – now I know why.”
However, she called the book a “lasting testimony” to Jack, 12, and Paul, nine.
“Whenever I do anything now, I do it for those two beautiful eyes – their eyes made the stars look dull and the sun look boring.
“They could’ve stood on my shoulders and reached the stars, and all that was taken away.”
She said she also wanted to reach other families who were suffering from domestic abuse.
“The biggest power an abuser has is isolation, because you think ‘it’s only me that’s going through this, I must be doing something wrong’,” she said.
“I’ve always felt I need to reach out to these women and say ‘I see you, I hear you, I believe you, and now I’m going to support you’.
“Nobody ever did with Jack and Paul, or myself.”
