The Incest Diary

‘Raw, relentless … Feverish’ New Yorker

‘This is a devastating book about harm. It’s about the harm that is unleashed when one person swaps their humanity for what you can really only call evil’ Sunday Times

‘A controlled, exquisitely written book, it disturbs and disgusts, but it also mesmerises and, at certain moments, charms in its quiet brutality’ Amia Srinivasan, Harper’s

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 with this secret. In this memoir, the author revisits her early traumas and their aftermath 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 secret. And then, years later, she made herself write it down.