The Incest Diary

About this book

In the fairy tales about fatherdaughter incestThe Girl Without Hands Thousand Furs the original Cinderella Donkey Skin and the stories of Saint Dymphna patron saint of incest survivorsthe daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their fathers sexual advances. They do everything in their power to escape. But I didnt. A child cant 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 awayeven as she grew into an independent and adventurous young womanshe 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 aftermathnot from a clinical distance but from deep withinto explore the ways in which her fathers 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.