The reader stops reading, walks around the room. This is a radioactive little book. Why was it published? Certainly an anonymous, real woman has a right to have her story known. But still, something troubles this reader about the brutal sensationalism, discreetly packaged in a quietly designed product (almost the brown paper bag that men used to wrap around porn) from esteemed publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. FSG! The literary home of Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot and Jonathan Franzen.
The Incest Diary Book Pdf
The Incest Diary does its work. The anonymous author is a strong writer, and she lays down a kind of dare with the furious brio of her prose: Whatever the reader feels is, after all, just a fraction of what this woman has allegedly gone through, and now she is permanently mangled by the man she once trusted most in the world. Believe her and feel very, very bad. Question this book and feel very, very bad too.
'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'sThroughout 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.
Writing for Vice, Lauren Oyler noted that early reactions to book, such as those published in The Independent, Globe and Mail and Newsweek were "disappointingly conservative".[1] H. C. Wilentz writes in The New Yorker that the book is "carefully wrought", and "the writing is often feverish", also noting that the critics of the book "pick apart the authors' methods and motives rather than engage with the thornier issues of taboo and transgression."[2] In a review in The New York Times, Dwight Garner praised the prose in the book as "clear and urgent" commenting that the "book offers more sensation than perspective."[3]
2ff7e9595c
Comments