The Incest Diary

By Bloomsbury Publishing

'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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781408890455

Reviews for The Incest Diary

[knightlight777 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

So what to make of this book? Maybe the first question is why read something like this? Maybe to understand what goes on in ones mind surrounding it. Not sure that can be found here. There are I think two ways to take what she wrote. One being to see the destruction it wreaks upon the life of the victim. The other nothing more than a pornographic put on to the reader.This anonymous writer if you believe the truth of what happened to her is torn it seems between the deep seated horror of living with a predator father and the prurient desire for that father. It becomes a twisted mess reading it and trying to decipher without much to really take away from it.Clearly this guy should have spent most of his life behind bars for what he did, yet doesn't and ends up possessing his daughters mind and body for life. Certainly feeling of sympathy for her plight is felt throughout yet as she repeatedly interjects the pleasure it brought her it leaves one confused.The style is readable and seems almost professional, reminded for some reason of Sylvia Plath. It certainly is never boring but left me feeling like I was the voyeur taken in by a tale of confusing twistedness. And maybe that was the point behind this book.

[nancyjean19 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up randomly at a book store where it was on a "recommendations" shelf, and I couldn't put it down. It was so disturbing but also different from what I expected. I can't imagine what it was like to write this book. Some commenters seem to think it was badly written, but I thought she was a great writer and I'm sure has other published works out there somewhere, under her own name. Weird to think she could be anyone.