Though it’s shocking to read, her choice to use “cock” and “pussy” instead of their more medical corollaries makes sense from the perspective of a writer who claims to be aroused when she has sex with her father, when she’s thinking about having sex with her father, and when she’s writing about having sex with her father. But it’s this language that sets her story apart from most chronicles of child abuse. 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. And I want to savagely mutilate his body and feed his corpse to dogs.” The author’s desire for her father is only matched by her urge to kill him, a psychological drama she deftly summarizes: “My father still excites me and he still scares me… I need to be obedient to him and to make him laugh and smile and feel pleasure. Sometimes I wanted it, and sometimes I seduced him and made him fuck me.”

But the secret under the secret is that sometimes I liked it.

“My father controlled my mind, my body, my desire,” she explains. But the dark twist on her own narrative is that when she was old enough to run, she didn’t exactly want to. The abuse continued into her teenage years and ceased, at least bodily, in her early 20s.Īs the author writes in the second paragraph of the book, the characters in father-daughter incest myths were horrified by their father’s sexual advances. (Oct.T he Incest Diary, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 18, is an anonymously written memoir about a woman who was violently and repeatedly raped by her father as a child. Her extraordinary, tangled self-analysis is a disarming record of her emotional and creative growth. She seethes with jealousy at Miller's wife June, swoons over poet and actor Antonin Artaud, neglects her protective husband, Hugh Guiler, and describes her traumatic delivery of a stillborn child.

Nin's ornate, hothouse prose is much rawer than the chiseled style of the expurgated diaries. Nin sought absolution from her psychiatrist and lover, Otto Rank, who advised her to bed her father, then dump him as punishment for abandoning her when she was 10. Her graphic account of their lovemaking and of her incestuous romantic feelings is fairly shocking. She describes Miller as crude, egotistic, imitative, childishly irresponsible, ``a madman.'' Her real focus, however, is her father, Joaquin Nin, a Spanish pianist and aristocratic Don Juan who seduced her after a 20-year absence.

Picking up where Henry and June (1986) left off, this portion of Nin's diary, which was cut from the expurgated editions published in her lifetime, records her steamy love affair with Henry Miller in Paris, but here her intense adoration gives way to disillusionment.

The incest diarey