There is nothing new about incest. It has existed in every society in history and has featured widely in literature and art. Ian McEwan, Lawrence Durrell and Donna Tartt are just some of the writers who have written about incestuous relationships between siblings, in fiction that has won plaudits and mass sales.
The Incest Diary is not a novel, and it’s not about incest between siblings. It is, or claims to be, a memoir by a woman who was raped by her father from the age of three. It is about the violence and abuse she suffered until she was 21. And, most shockingly, it’s about desire. “My father,” says the author, “controlled my mind, my body, my desire. I wanted him. I went home. I went back for more.”
“If this were a novel, no reputable publisher would touch it
If this was a novel, no reputable publisher would touch it. The book’s editor is clear that it isn’t. He has, he says in an explanatory note, “no doubt” about its authenticity. He has seen medical records. He has interviewed the author’s friends. The author, he says, spent years “wrestling” with the question of whether or not to write it. She has done it, he says, “to set down the truth about her life”. A number of reviewers have said they don’t believe it. I understand their doubts, but I think they are wrong.
From the outside, it looks like the relatively normal upbringing of a child of middle-class, educated parents who have a beach house and a cabin in Maine. From the inside, it’s one of the most shocking stories I have ever read. Searing detail is piled upon searing detail, all the more appalling for its sometimes pornographic tone. When, as a small child, the author showed her mother the blood between her legs, she “said nothing, did nothing”. For her mother, she says, she was “the other woman”. When she finally confronted her father, in her early twenties, he said that as a child she had “seduced” him. After seeing a lawyer, he started talking about “allegations”. Her grandfather tried to get her sectioned. Her brother had a breakdown. Terrified that he would kill himself, she decided to tell him, and their father, that she must have got it all wrong. She carried on seeing her father, who has never been held to account for his crimes.
The prose is pared to the bone, the sentences often short and staccato, as if all excess must be cut to get at the truth. The structure is fragmentary, as if to reinforce the point that she’s piecing together a broken life. And the language is harsh. The word “f***” appears on almost every page, but then this is the word her father taught her when she was three.
Advertisement
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. The poison spreads. The evil ripples down the generations. The author’s father was abused by his grandfather. He was poisoned and chose to act on it. His daughter was poisoned, too. It is clear from the shocking, horrible end of the book that she has not been set free.
She is alive. She has survived. A fellow student who confessed to incest committed suicide, as many victims of incest do. She has tried to tell the truth, or as near as she can get to the truth.
The Incest Diary is charged with an intensity that is at times poetic, but there is too much ugliness at its heart for it to be beautiful. The publisher says the book “will be a source of hope and validation”. It’s hard to see where the hope lies. If you read it, you will feel sullied. You will feel that you have learnt something about the depths of human nature that you didn’t want to know.
Bloomsbury £12.99 pp132
