The Incest Diary

By Random House Publishing Group

“In the fairy tales about father–daughter incest—‘The Girl Without Hands,’ ‘Thousand Furs,’ the original ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Donkey Skin,’ and the stories of Saint Dymphna, patron saint of incest survivors—the daughters are all as you would expect them to be, horrified by their father’s sexual advances. They do everything in their power to escape. But I didn’t. A little child can’t escape. And later, when I could, it was too late.”
 
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 in and around this all-encompassing secret. Her sexual relationship with her father lasted, off and on, into her twenties. It formed her world, and it formed her deepest fears and desires. Even after she broke away—even as she grew into an independent and adventurous young woman—she continued to seek out new versions of the violence, submission, and secrecy she had struggled to leave behind.
     In this graphic and harrowing memoir, the author revisits her early traumas and their aftermath—not from a clinical distance, but from deep within—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 dirty secret. And then, years later, she made herself write it down.
     With lyric concision, in vignettes of almost unbearable intensity, this writer tells a story that is shocking but that will ring true to many other survivors of abuse. It has never been faced so directly on the page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780771048289

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.