![]() The incest taboo is real, and the author's choice to remain anonymous is not surprising in a note introducing the text, she writes, "I have changed many specifics in order to preserve my anonymity. Incest is often a theme, an underlying motivation or explanation, but it is rarely the point. In a note at the beginning of the book, editor Lorin Stein describes FSG's decision to publish it: In addition to being a "work of art" and, hopefully, a "source of hope and validation to others," he writes, "the situation it describes (though a perennial subject of art and myth) has rarely been described this way, from within." Indeed, The Incest Diary bears many similarities to other narratives about incest-the secrecy, the shame, the specificity of the psychological and social repercussions-but the author's relentless focus on the incest and its aftermath distances The Incest Diary from other works. The account that follows would render this claim laughable if it were not so sad. Eventually she takes the "allegations" back, saying it must have been someone else who raped her. He goes on to tell family and friends the author's grandfather tries to get her committed to a mental institution, and her brother has a breakdown for which she feels responsible. I can only assume that he'd spoken with a lawyer, and that this is why he started using the word allegations, and why he no longer admitted to our incest, but denied it. He said that if I was going to persist in my allegations about him having raped me, then I was no longer his daughter. (The failure of the euphemism molest is obvious at these moments.) Near the beginning of the book she confronts her father, and he apologizes repeatedly and cries. Other times, she tells someone about it, but withholds details, making it seem less severe than it was. ![]() More than once, the author alights on a hopeful moment of confession-with a family friend, with her mother, with her grandmother-only to have the person in whom she's confiding ignore her. She describes how, during her 12-year marriage, she tried to cultivate a "sexless home." She describes, finally, a kind of redemption, but it too circles back to the incest, a thing she can't escape. She describes an affair she has with a much older man while spending a year abroad in Chile, a situation also steeped in family and secrecy that she calls "returning to the scene of the crime." She describes how she knew "how to leave my body behind" when she was date-raped by a colleague. She describes feeling lonely around the family of a childhood friend, "a father who was a father and a daughter who was nothing more than a daughter." She describes her mother saying she wished the author had never been born. She describes drawings she'd make of little girls being impaled by buildings having to be rushed to the hospital for abdominal pains teachers being concerned but never really doing anything about it her mother, who was depressed and obsessed with horses, doing nothing either. She describes seeing her father fuck her mother and feeling envy. She describes her father tying her to a chair and locking her in a closet and feeling grateful when she is let out. On the third night he did." She describes many of the times her father threatened, hurt, and raped her, but she also describes the emotional and physical consequences. I wanted and I didn't want him to come in and fuck me. She describes "the last time I had sex with my father," at the family beach house: "The first two nights I couldn't stop masturbating, thinking about my father being so close… I couldn't help it. Read more: 'Why Can't I Consent to Sex with My Brother?' On Genetic Sexual Attractionįrom there, the narrative moves back and forth in time, but the author is always purposeful with her graphic details each moment is worth recounting in a review. My father controlled my mind, my body, my desire. And later, when I could, it was too late. They do everything in their power to escape. Discussing "fairy tales about father–daughter incest" at the beginning of the book, she sets up the problem that she will go on to illuminate but never solve: "The daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their father's sexual advances. Rather, they are the author's insistence, over and over again, throughout her painfully straightforward account of the physical and psychological torment that was inflicted on her, that she "wanted" her father. Slim and featuring a sickly taupe cover, the book consists of a nauseating series of vignettes about how the author's father raped and abused her from ages three to 21, but its most uncomfortable moments are not the horrific, often violent descriptions of rape. The Incest Diary, an anonymous memoir published this week by FSG, raises these questions but, in its steadily calm, clear-eyed, and brutal way, does not attempt to answer them.
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