The Incest Diary
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An anonymous author reveals a lifetime of secrets in this unforgettable memoir as she tells the story of her relationship with her father, who raped her over the course of her childhood, until the author was 21. The result is one of the most frank and cathartic depictions of child abuse ever written. The author recalls abusing her Barbie dolls, her sense of being the other woman to her own mother, and the mingling of violence with desire, a tendency so crucial to the author s development that it continues to govern her adult relationships. This is not a story of things getting better, but an unflinching and staggeringly artful portrait of a shattered life. Sex with my father made me an orphan, she writes, and the feeling is underscored, pages later, with a fact: He threatened to kill himself if I told anyone. Works of art by Fernando Botero and Frida Kahlo are invoked throughout, as are the fairy tales in which the author searches for analogues to explain her condition. But by the end of the book, she has articulated an experience that for many victims remains unspeakable.
