'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.
'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.
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