Overview

An extraordinary, powerful and beautifully written memoir of a daughter's abuse by, and attachment to, her father. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, the anonymous author of The Incest Diary was raped by her father. Beneath a veneer of normal family life, she grew up in and around this all-encompassing secret. Her sexual relationship with her father lasted, off and on, into her twenties. It formed her world, and it formed her deepest fears and desires. Even after she broke away - even as she grew into an independent and adventurous young woman - she continued to seek out new versions of the violence, submission and secrecy she had struggled to leave behind. In this graphic and harrowing memoir, the author revisits her early traumas and their aftermath - not from a clinical distance, but from deep within - to explore the ways in which her father’s abuse shaped her, and still does. As a matter of psychic survival, she became both a sexual object and a detached observer, a dutiful daughter and the protector of a dirty secret. And then, years later, she made herself write it down. With lyric concision, in vignettes of almost unbearable intensity, this writer tells a story that is shocking but that will ring true to many other survivors of abuse. It has never been faced so directly on the page.

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9781408890424

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Reviews

One of the most frank and cathartic depictions of child abuse ever written * Publishers Weekly * Shocking and searing ... This is a devastating book about harm. It's about the harm that is unleashed when one person swaps their humanity for what you can really only call evil -- Christina Patterson * Sunday Times * Her memoir seeks to evoke, in a way few before it have, the transgressive rush some might find in taboo sexual behaviour ... Clear and urgent ... it has genuine intensities of thought and feeling * New York Times * The Incest Diary ... is disturbing for many reasons and for this reader, impossible to put down ... The anonymous author is a strong writer, and she lays down a kind of dare with the furious brio of her prose * Newsweek * In a bare minimum of spare, straightforward pages, the anonymous author of The Incest Diary manages to accomplish a nearly inconceivable literary task: She makes it possible not only to imagine the psychological impact of ongoing sexual violation but also to understand in visceral terms why she and so many others cannot escape their abusers ... The author is such a brilliant writer, though, that there are moments of joy and beauty to be found even within that discomfort; perhaps the discomfort even makes them sharper and more precious -- Emily Gould

Author Information

To protect her privacy, the author has chosen to be anonymous. She has changed certain details in order to preserve her anonymity but has not altered the essentials.

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