New York Times on “The Incest Diary” by Anonymous: Criticism of reviews in which characters have a “descent into madness” and memoirs “dive into the abyss”

Since my previous post (on another book) had touched on what editors and publishers will accept and vouch for, today’s New York Times book review of The Incest Diary caught my attention.

I cannot be sure whether the reviewer, Dwight Garner, meant to reassure readers that the book is credible, or meant to ridicule the publisher’s way of vouching for the book’s credibility. His review includes the following:

“The author is apparently (there are a few clues) a published writer. Anonymity combined with extreme events: never a happy combination. About this book’s veracity, its publisher’s editor at large, Lorin Stein, who also edits The Paris Review, told the book’s potential foreign publishers in a statement: ‘I have no doubt about her honesty or clarity of mind. We interviewed old friends to whom the author confided the fact of her abuse years ago’ ” (1).

Note the precise words of the publisher’s prepared statement: “We interviewed old friends to whom the author confided the fact of her abuse years ago”: the fact, not the facts. Thus, at most, the old friends corroborated the fact that her father had abused her in some way. But they had little or nothing to say about the facts of her abuse, all the specific acts described in the book. Thus, the book may be anywhere from one percent to a hundred percent historically true.

The review says Anonymous eventually confronts her father about the years of abuse, and describes his response and the response of her family members, but I am guessing that if there had been a full confession and corroboration for all the specific acts of abuse previously described, then the publisher would have cited that corroboration in its prepared statement.

And apart from the issue of vague corroboration, why would the publisher have no doubt about the author’s “clarity of mind”? If you assumed that all the “horror scenes,” beginning at age three, were true, wouldn’t you infer that there might be serious psychological effects? Yet the review makes no mention of whether the author ever needed or had therapy.

Since, as the reviewer says, “Incest has been a steady presence in post-Homeric literature…Incest is a fact in many lives,” shouldn’t reviewers familiarize themselves with its potential psychological effects, and include that perspective in their reviews?

I am not attacking the credibility of this memoir (which is probably true to some unknown degree), but the credibility of other reviews in which characters are said to have a “descent into madness” and of this review in which the author is said to “dive into the abyss,” phrases which are psychologically meaningless.

The reviewer probably assumes that the only reasons for the author’s anonymity are embarrassment and legal, but if the person was abused since age three, the author may be an alternate personality.

1. Dwight Garner. “A Dive Into the Abyss in the Anonymous ‘Incest Diary’.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/books/review-anonymous-incest-diary.html?_r=0