Sad Tiger
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At nineteen, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.
Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother's, as well as her abusive stepfather's; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.
Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake's poem "The Tyger"—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.
Contains mature themes.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this harrowing but arresting meditation on abuse, Neige Sinno processes her experience by struggling to understand it. For years, Sinno was molested by her stepfather, who was eventually imprisoned for his crimes. The trauma that resulted had a defining effect on her life. Sad Tiger, though, is anything but a linear account. Unbound by chronology or conventional narrative, she examines every aspect of her experiences from multiple directions through a shifting array of sources, as if continually juggling them in her mind. Trying to get into the head of her abuser, she examines his crimes and motivations from inside and out. Along the way, she alternates anecdotal passages with everything from letters and newspaper stories to the transcript of her stepfather’s trial. Sinno also leans into literary analysis, peering deeply into works by Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, and others, seeking parallels to her personal history. Jennifer Pickens is a truly empathetic narrator of Sinno’s horrific past. She doesn’t just recount Sinno’s trauma, she embodies it—you can hear every ounce of hurt in her haunted, tragic tone. Sad Tiger is a rough ride with a lot to reveal about humanity.
