Like Annie Ernaux or Sheila Heti, Neige Sinno has created a powerful new literary autobiographical form.
Through its radical honesty, and also through its thoughtful interrogations into the nature of life and literature, Neige Sinno shares with her readers her journey from someone who considered her life to have been stolen from her to someone who over the twenty years that elapsed from her reporting the rape to writing this book, somehow got her life back, all without ever being able to erase or even change what had happened to her as a child.
This international literary phenomenon—the title inspired by William Blake's poem The Tyger—is a forensic exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. Repeatedly exposed to sexual violence as a child, Neige Sinno tells of a family life built around lies and deception. She was seven or eight years old when her stepfather started abusing her. At fourteen or fifteen the abuse stopped. At nineteen, she decides to break her silence which leads to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, and Sinno starts a new life in Mexico, far away from France.
It is through the craft of her narrative and her powerful direct analysis of the deep-seated taboo that Sinno explores the different facets of memory, her own, her mother's, as well as her abusive stepfather's; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. How do we become who we are? What remains unsaid in families? How is society implicated? This harrowing auto-fictional account of the author's sexual abuse as a child is mediated through analysis of various literary texts, including works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes.
In this unparalleled work that contains a thousand questions, a thousand jewel-like insights, there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from the rape, the incest that she herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.
