The Incest Diary, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 18, is an anonymously written memoir about a woman who was violently and repeatedly raped by her father as a child. The abuse continued into her teenage years and ceased, at least bodily, in her early 20s.
As the author writes in the second paragraph of the book, the characters in father-daughter incest myths were horrified by their father’s sexual advances. But the dark twist on her own narrative is that when she was old enough to run, she didn’t exactly want to.
“My father controlled my mind, my body, my desire,” she explains. And later on: “My father is my secret. That he raped me is my secret. But the secret under the secret is that sometimes I liked it. Sometimes I wanted it, and sometimes I seduced him and made him fuck me.”
The author’s desire for her father is only matched by her urge to kill him, a psychological drama she deftly summarizes: “My father still excites me and he still scares me… I need to be obedient to him and to make him laugh and smile and feel pleasure. I want him to be proud of me. I want him to think that I’m clever. I want him to think that I’m sexy. And I want to savagely mutilate his body and feed his corpse to dogs.”
