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 7 or 8 years old when her stepfather started abusing her. At fourteen or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, 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 Sinnoexplores 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.
