“…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.”
–Lauren Oyler, Broadly, July 18, 2017
