...steadily calm, clear-eyed, and brutal ... the narrative moves back and forth in time, but the author is always purposeful with her graphic details; each moment is worth recounting in a review ... The Incest Diary bears many similarities to other narratives about incest—the secrecy, the shame, the specificity of the psychological and social repercussions—but the author's relentless focus on the incest and its aftermath distances The Incest Diary from other works. Incest is often a theme, an underlying motivation or explanation, but it is rarely the point ... early reactions to the book have been disappointingly conservative, emphasizing the potential scandal or harm it could cause...these concessions betray the author's effort to honestly examine what happened to her—and has happened to many people—in favor of decency or covering one's bases. They make it clear that few people know how to talk about incest—as well as why a book like this is so necessary.
The author sugarcoats nothing about her ordeal and the damage done. But her memoir seeks to evoke, in a way few before it have, the transgressive rush some might find in taboo sexual behavior ... This is a book about heat rather than coolness. It is about incandescent libido and the charring that is a result. Among the many disturbing things about The Incest Diary is a sense that the author is working to turn the reader on, too ... The prose in The Incest Diary is clear and urgent. This is not a major book but it has genuine intensities of thought and feeling. I was never happy to be reading it. You may feel that your face is being rubbed too repeatedly in a certain kind of mud ... This book offers more sensation than perspective. The author’s scalded and mixed emotions are best summarized by these two sentences: 'I want him to think that I’m sexy. And I want to savagely mutilate his body and feed his corpse to dogs.'”
Lolita is a book that appears to be about seduction but is really about rape. The Incest Diary presents itself as the inverse, a book apparently about rape but really about seduction. But this conceit betrays the further truth — call it the secret under the secret under the secret — that sometimes rape and seduction, coercion and desire, are not opposed at all … There has lately been a cultural turn toward believing, as a matter of decent politics, the purported victims of rape and sexual abuse. The Incest Diary shows us, horrifyingly, why that matters … It is hard to assess The Incest Diary as a literary object. For all its elegance, its moments of chilly beauty, the book never allows one to fully divorce it, as a piece of writing, from its devastating occasion — much less to entertain the thought that the abuse might be somehow redeemed through its writing. It is far easier to say, or should be, that the book is a significant feminist text.
The relationship between art, the Diarist’s vagina, and the sky is a subtle but extraordinary motif in The Incest Diary ... it belongs to the tradition of intensely autobiographical women’s literature, or women’s life-writing, of the kind brought into the mainstream this century by Maggie Nelson ... This book is no more than a broken thing, a gap in the covering of nakedness. And so the degradation of the Diarist’s language, which has so appalled her newspaper critics, comes to represent a kind of nakedness in communication. When a person tries to use language to describe the experience of being fucked by her father who stinks of white wine under a blanket that does not even cover her, what parts of herself and what parts of speech can be adequate to the task?
I hold no advanced degrees in psychology, but to victims of sexual trauma vulnerable to long bouts of depression following exposure to highly triggering content, I recommend approaching this book with caution. Or not at all ... The author’s use of pornographic language in the rape scenes—including in the child rape scenes—is only slightly less shocking than the fact that no one in her life helped her out of her situation. But it’s this language that sets her story apart from most chronicles of child abuse ... As a human being, while reading this book, I was in a functional state of shock from beginning to end. But as a critic, I was impressed by how well those horrific scenes were written ... I’m essentially recommending the book to you, if you’ve got the stomach for it. Because in this work about a horror no one should ever experience, there is also something that needs to be experienced.
This is a radioactive little book. Why was it published? Certainly an anonymous, real woman has a right to have her story known. But still, something troubles this reader about the brutal sensationalism, discreetly packaged in a quietly designed product ... The Incest Diary does its work. The anonymous author is a strong writer, and she lays down a kind of dare with the furious brio of her prose: Whatever the reader feels is, after all, just a fraction of what this woman has allegedly gone through, and now she is permanently mangled by the man she once trusted most in the world. Believe her and feel very, very bad. Question this book and feel very, very bad too.
...one of the most frank and cathartic depictions of child abuse ever written ... This is not a story of things getting better, but an unflinching and staggeringly artful portrait of a shattered life ... Works of art by Fernando Botero and Frida Kahlo are invoked throughout, as are the fairy tales in which the author searches for analogues to explain her condition. But by the end of the book, she has articulated an experience that for many victims remains unspeakable.
In The Incest Diary the writing is often feverish, communicating the confusing, involuntary pleasure that the author felt alongside the psychic and physical pain ... By the end of the book, she seems no closer to a life unchained from the memory of her abuse. There is something bracing about this refusal of resolution.
