Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Incest Diary

Incest Diary

Anonymous

Paperback

Biographies GeneralAbuse

Publisher Price: $19.00

ISBN10: 0374537798
ISBN13: 9780374537791
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: Jul 10 2018
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.40 Width: 4.90 Depth: 7.20
Language: English

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 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.

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