'Raw, relentless ... Feverish' New Yorker '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' Sunday Times 'A controlled, exquisitely written book, it disturbs and disgusts, but it also mesmerises and, at certain moments, charms in its quiet brutality' Amia Srinivasan, Harper's 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 with this secret. In this memoir, the author revisits her early traumas and their aftermath 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 secret. And then, years later, she made herself write it down.
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.
Title: The Incest Diary
Author: Anonymous
ISBN: 9781408890424
Binding:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date: 2018-11-01
Number of Pages: 144
Weight: 0.0800 kg
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
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 * New York Times *
A controlled, exquisitely written book, it disturbs and disgusts, but it also mesmerises and, at certain moments, charms in its quiet brutality -- Amia Srinivasan * Harper's *
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 *
Raw, relentless ... Feverish * New Yorker *
