Tangled Reality

In her first memoir, translated by Natasha Lehrer, the French novelist Neige Sinno recounts her experience of childhood sexual abuse – in sometimes shocking detail. Although Sinno uses the autobiographical form, the narrator of Sad Tiger is a carefully crafted textual persona through whom she explores the subjectivity of a victim-survivor. Sinno doesn’t stop there – she uses the first-person form to move beyond her own experiences, considering sexual violence as a wider phenomenon through several lenses: literature, film, images, podcasts, popular news, fairytale, myth, sociology, psychology, and more. Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, and Dorothy Allison are among those quoted and paraphrased. At times, the writing feels like a work of literary criticism, but one that allows Sinno to discuss serious and complex matters, such as power and its misuse, the shame that abuse engenders, and the scars that survivors bear for their whole lives.

Exploring the problem of sexual violence from different angles, Sad Tiger pulls us into many minds. We hear from survivors and their family members, perpetrators and their therapists, academics and ordinary people who are simply interested in the subject. Ultimately, the book suggests that a polyphonic literary form might offer a more authentic view of sexual violence and its tangled reality – the psychological challenges faced by those who experience it, the difficulties of speaking up, the ineffaceable scars left by trauma, the power dynamics involved, and the monstrousness of violating a child.

Even the title of Sinno’s book has a polyvocal quality, referencing the memoir, Tiger, Tiger, by American author Margaux Fragoso, another survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Fragoso’s title is itself a reference to William Blake’s poem, ‘The Tyger’, and Sinno’s narrator uses these two works, as well as Blake’s illustration for his poem, to contemplate the entwined existences of victim and abuser. She writes that she is ‘obsessed’ with the question in Blake’s poem, ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ The lamb, in Blake’s poem, is the tiger’s ‘innocent double’. We learn that Fragoso interprets Blake’s lamb and tiger as ‘the victim and her abuser, whose respective suffering came together to create a jail, a cage in which they were both trapped like tortured animals’. The cover of Sad Tiger’s English edition alludes to this image of two tortured animals, depicting a woman’s body wrapped around a tiger, their limbs so tangled together they are almost indistinguishable. But Sinno’s book also includes a very different rendering: Blake’s illustration, which portrays the tiger as ‘an odd, slightly ungainly beast’. These layered references enable Sinno’s narrator to explore the many forms a tiger, a sexual predator, can take. As a child, she viewed her abuser as all-powerful, but she now considers him pathetic – a man trying to exert control over the most vulnerable people around him.

Towards the end of the book, the narrator addresses the matter of polyphony in her writing, asking, ‘Is it obligatory for autobiography to always reference the intimate, private sphere?’ This question takes on forceful significance when considered within the context of the #MeToo movement, which was powerful precisely because its participants did not tell their story alone – they drew strength from a global collective. The chorus, no matter how discordant or chaotic, was more resonant than any single voice.

Sinno’s memoir takes a similar tack – not merely because she draws on other testimonies comparable to her own, but because the stories from this wider community help her articulate what she herself went through. Sinno’s narrator suggests that she didn’t really ‘want to write in this autobiographical form’, that she’d ‘love to be able to escape the first-person singular, to hide in some sort of plural. Not to have this disagreeable sense of telling [her] life story’. Although she writes in the first person, the narrator takes refuge in the collective by weaving in other accounts, using them to explore details about her life.

Her reflections on Woolf are just one example. In Moments of Being, a collection of posthumously published autobiographical writings, Woolf describes what is today a well-known phenomenon – that of ‘freezing’ in response to the threat of sexual assault. In Sad Tiger, we read that Woolf describes, ‘with a clarity notable for its candor and good sense, the emotions she felt, what would in the future come to be called traumatic shock’. Using Woolf’s words to convey her own experience, Sinno’s narrator foregrounds the tragic universality of this response to sexual violence. For her, this ‘moment outside time, unbound from the course of history, so charged with absurdity and meaning that it eludes any attempt at narrative comprehension’ is terrifyingly widespread – and to make this point, she pores over what Woolf wrote a century ago.

Moments like these in Sad Tiger are reminiscent of a key ambition of the #MeToo movement – to convey the grim banality of sexual violence. Crucially, though, the text, through its form, evokes the plurality of the #MeToo movement. Rather than portray different experiences of sexual violence as harmonious or unified, the book casts them as heterogenous and full of contrasts, contradictions, and ambiguities.

This complexity is perhaps best conveyed when the narrator shows us how a survivor’s memories and impressions are often plagued with uncertainty, and how they can, at times, appear unreliable due to omissions or inconsistencies. We observe as much from the way the book opens – with three attempts at writing a portrait of the man who abused her as a child. The first is titled ‘Portrait of my rapist’, but in place of a portrait, the narrator expresses an unusual opinion: that the subjectivity of the perpetrator is far more ‘interesting’ than that of the survivor. The next section – titled ‘The portrait’ – gets a little closer: ‘He is a man who is full of life. He is always moving, he’s all action’. In this section, we learn many things about her rapist – that he wanted many, many children; that he loved butter because it reminded him of his childhood in the country; that he burned easily from the sun. But these details don’t bring us closer to any aspects of his identity that one would associate with the label ‘rapist’. The narrator knows that she has failed in her portrait: ‘Okay, that’s enough. I tried’, she writes. The narrator is, like Sinno, an already accomplished novelist, yet here she explains that creating a literary portrait of her rapist is simply too hard: ‘I can’t do it’. She provides two reasons: first, because she’s ‘trying to stick to some hypothetical objective truth’ and ‘then of course, it’s impossible because it’s him’. Nonetheless, she tries once again in ‘All right then, the portrait’, in which she reveals the more ‘[b]rutish’ aspects of his personality and concludes that though he once seemed ‘godlike’, in truth ‘perhaps he was just a bit of a loser’. Despite this being her third and final attempt, she seems doubtful of even this portrait’s success.

With these opening pages, we are plunged into the mind of a survivor of sexual violence lacking confidence in her ability to know and articulate the truths of her own experience. Sound familiar? It should; claims of sexual violence are often scrutinised heavily – by the people to whom the survivor reports the violence and by the courts of law that judge their testimonies. Under such scrutiny, it can be hard to muster the confidence to denounce a person once powerful enough to manipulate and exert dominance over you. As the narrator moves through anecdotes about her childhood, her abuse, and her healing, she circles back to ideas already articulated, sometimes contradicting earlier statements. She identifies the flaws in her account, such as her tendency to repeat herself: ‘Yes, energy, strength, I’ve said that already’; ‘[t]he mountains, the army, the banlieue. I’ve said all that already too’.

But there is another voice woven into this hesitant, wandering narrative: that of an author writing at a remove, who walks us through the decisions she makes while writing. For example, which pronoun should she use? While ‘I’ would make it clear that the abused little girl and the forty-four-year-old narrator are the same person, using ‘she’ might better convey that this is a victim of the past (she uses the ‘I’, reserving ‘she’ for the other survivors that she quotes or writes about). 

The deployment of this dual narrative voice – of survivor and author – suggests that any given aspect of someone’s life can be understood in multiple ways, from multiple perspectives, which brings into question the ethicality of trying to understand any experience from just one angle. How can we be so sure that one person’s perspective – no matter how close to an event – can ever lead to the ‘truth’? Why conceive of the ‘truth’ as a single, hegemonic, and objective entity when perhaps there are many truths, each as ambivalent and faltering as the next?

Alleged survivors are often required to retrace traumatic details in order to arrive at a single version of events. But as Sinno’s narrator shows us, the quest to come up with a coherent account can be fraught with obstacles. She explains that she can recount certain memories in vivid detail, but there are other details she struggles to piece together. She tells us about events of her life that have been described to her, but that her own memory has erased, such as the day she put a safety pin in her vagina and her mother had to remove it. The narrator also acknowledges the discrepancies between her memories and her mother’s, specifying, for instance, that, because of the differing accounts, she doesn’t even know when the abuse began or ended: ‘Was I seven, eight or nine? Did it go on until I was fourteen, or longer?’ The narrator knows that these details matter, especially to a court of law. She acknowledges the ‘incoherencies in the account. Incoherencies are dangerous, they call into question the reliability of the person who is speaking, you start by doubting one detail and end up doubting everything’.

The narrator repeatedly foregrounds her doubts about her own testimony, her exhaustion at having to ‘[v]erify dates, specific circumstances. One more time’. In so doing, she reminds us of the fallibility of the mind and its memories, which writer and journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley has herself discussed in The Lasting Harm with regard to the testimonies given by Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s victims. The accounts of survivors of sexual violence sometimes seem to not stack up and, as a result, their words are often disbelieved. But for Osborne-Crowley, this apparent unreliability is precisely what renders an account of sexual violence reliable. In life-threatening situations, the mind triggers an acute stress response, which in turn can distort or obscure memories. Because of this physiological mechanism – designed to protect the mind and body from a perceived threat – survivors often report having memories that are either extremely vivid, entirely blank, or a combination of both.

The challenges that survivors face when providing a testimony go beyond memory’s fallibility; the act of enunciation is also hard. The narrator reminds us of this when she addresses her reader directly. She uses the term ‘dear reader’ many times and even expresses her hope that this person is a friend: ‘I know you’re not a juror. If you are holding this book in your hands, there’s a decent chance that you’re on my side […] It’s a safe space, a space with no enemies. I don’t need to convince anyone of anything.’ Osborne-Crowley writes that, in the vast majority of cases, a survivor will only reveal the abuse to a close and trusted loved one, typically an intimate partner, and often only many years after the abuse has ended (in the text, we learn that Sinno revealed the abuse to her best friend when they were teenagers). By naming the book a ‘safe space’, the narrator nods to the fact that a caring environment is most often a precondition for breaking the silence.

These kinds of passages plunge the reader into a self-conscious and hesitant mind; it is the mind of a survivor contemplating her trauma, but also of a writer who deploys the stories and ideas of others to grapple with the complexities of human experience, as we see in her references to authors such as Fragoso, Blake, and Woolf.  Ultimately, this layered narrative voice asks us to think through what it means to attempt to know and articulate an objective truth about a traumatic event. Though this is what the justice system demands, Sinno’s book pushes us to consider that this quest for truth may not only negatively impact the survivor, but that the particular truth sought may be impossible to attain.

For, indeed, the narrator casts objective truth as elusive, and ultimately unknowable. The most obvious example lies in the book’s inclusion of archival documents from Sinno’s childhood. This inclusion is a performative act – a means of illustrating the mindset of a person asked to build a solid case. There are copies of newspaper clippings from 1977, when her mother gave birth to her unassisted in a rural commune in southeastern France; from 1993, when a regional journalist wrote a ‘human interest story’ of a day trip taken by Sinno and her family; and from 2000, when the local press covered her stepfather’s trial, which took place when she was 23. The book even includes scanned copies of the two letters that Sinno and her mother filed to the public prosecutor – their initial complaint against Sinno’s stepfather. Additionally, the narrator describes family portraits from her childhood, lingering on the details that supposedly prove either her unhappiness during the abuse or her joyfulness once the abuse had ended. The narrator even explains that she feels as though ‘the transcript of the trial, stamped and sealed, with its articles of law, attorneys’ and clerks’ signatures, validates [her] story’, as though the ‘[p]hotos, documents, letters from the time, the court report, all function as proof that it happened’.

There is a key irony behind the inclusion of these images and words: while photographs and official documents are often used as evidence to back up one’s claims, they don’t actually provide much insight into an alleged event. As Sinno’s narrator writes, these fragments are no more than ‘the fragile crutches of this testimony without witnesses’. Despite their air of authority, such fragments fail to help us understand the embodied experience of surviving trauma. The narrator, through her dual identity as survivor and author, and through her doubts and uncertainties, shows us that it is simply impossible for a court of law to obtain an objective truth. She writes that ‘[a] trial cannot establish the truth. It’s a way of comparing competing versions of the same fact or series of facts’. By including many voices, and by moving between different approaches to representation (autobiographical writing, literary criticism, digital scans of newspaper clippings and handwritten letters), Sad Tiger suggests that any particular representation of something – an image, a story, a memory, a court testimony – can only ever offer one vision of a far more complex, multi-faceted reality. The narrator even informs us that she considered including in the book the testimonies from the trial, that she thought about how ‘[t]he juxtaposition of [her] prose with the legal language of the trial could make an interesting parallel, offering a means to compare two ways of writing about the same event and to tease out the differences’.

Though Sad Tiger doesn’t include those testimonies, the book indeed seeks to ‘tease out the differences’. Though the narrator compares her own experience of abuse with those of others (like Woolf’s), she also teases out differences in opinion. In so doing, she deconstructs the notion of a monolithic truth, exposing the seemingly infinite variability of such experiences. By refusing to chase after an objective truth and, by accounting for paradoxes and contradictions, the narrator captures the messier, more complex realities of the phenomenon of sexual violence.

The narrator’s commitment to juxtaposing differing views on sexual violence emerges in her discussion of Virginie Despentes’ iconic King Kong Theory. Despentes writes that the possibility of being raped is ‘a risk worth taking’ so that women can freely exist in and move around public space. Although Despentes would later reconsider this perspective, recognising the long-term consequences of trauma, in King Kong Theory she explains that, at a certain point on her road to recovery, she had tried very hard to just move on: ‘I had better fucking things to do with my life than allow three loser dickheads to traumatize me’. Sinno’s narrator feels differently, writing that, although she admires the idea that a survivor’s response to a traumatic event may have empowering potential, in her case, she feels her fortitude worked in her stepfather’s favour: by getting on with her life, she had let her rapist ‘off the hook for what he’d done’. Not only that, but she never actually got over it, because, in the end, getting over it isn’t really possible. ‘[W]hen you grew up being raped, it’s a misapprehension to talk about getting over it’, she observes, adding, ‘Pick yourself up and move on doesn’t apply when it comes to child abuse’. In this reflection on Despentes, Sinno’s narrator explores not only difference of opinion, but the shifting stages of a survivor’s subjectivity over time – from initial attempts to ‘get over it’ to the realisation that recovery is extremely hard. Here, the narrator is sceptical of the passage in King Kong Theory, but affirms that she likes it nonetheless. 

Yet there are moments in Sad Tiger when she expresses much stronger disagreement with the views that she canvasses. She talks, for example, about Diana J. Torres, a Spanish writer and performance artist, who said that she derived both pleasure and power from having sexual relations with more than sixty adults by the time she turned sixteen. Sinno’s narrator explains that she herself has never felt this way, but that it is important to spend time with perspectives at odds with our own: ‘what is true for me isn’t necessarily true for someone else’. More than this, the narrator explains that, as a general principle, she admires those who transgress the expectations of ordinary society and challenge societal mores: ‘Why not listen to the voices that contradict everything we think we know about child victims?’ And when she expresses strong disagreement with the logic behind using the term ‘survivor’ instead of ‘victim’, she takes the time to engage, to lay out her reasons for her own views. She disagrees, in part, because the very definition of rape is bound up in a radical deprivation of agency: ‘A person who has been raped is a victim of rape, of an assault committed on her against her will’.

Sad Tiger thus explores not only the harmony, but also the discord within the vast sum of experiences of sexual violence, showing the impossibility of capturing this global problem in its entirety. It’s too vast, and individual encounters are far too different from one another.  Throughout the book, the narrator spends time with others’ experiences and opinions while specifying where and how her own ideas coincide or collide with theirs. And in unravelling the complexities of her own and others’ subjectivities, the book dismantles the notion of an objective truth, avoids homogenising experiences of sexual violence, and foregrounds what the narrator refers to as the importance of ‘restoring the complexity of contradictory perceptions’.

The narrator even goes so far as to make a compelling case for why the perspective of the perpetrator is important to sit with as well. It’s not just because doing so is ‘fascinating’ and therefore, as Nabokov’s Lolita shows us, worthy of art. More than this, attempting to get inside a rapist’s mind can help us grasp the enormity of the crime. And so, throughout the book, the narrator paraphrases her stepfather’s words from the testimony, as well as his illogical justifications for why he raped her for so long. That is, he loved her so much, and rape was the only way to be close to the little girl who rebuffed him. Rather than turn away from his problematic reasoning, which is repeatedly described as ‘evil’, the book takes us closer. It’s in diving into the rapist’s subjectivity and unearthing his horrifying decisions that Sad Tiger makes a point that is both provocative and potentially insightful. The narrator explains that while most people can imagine the survivor’s perspective (even if they don’t share that experience), understanding the perpetrator’s perspective is far more challenging.

Trauma is often described as ‘unspeakable’ – as an experience that disturbs a person so profoundly that they cannot find the words to faithfully describe it. But here, the narrator of Sad Tiger frames the unspeakable not so much as trauma beyond words, but as depravity beyond words. For Sinno’s narrator, the minds of ‘criminals, monsters’ are fascinating, their minds hold ‘the clue to one of life’s greatest mysteries: evil’. In this way, the narrator shows us that the unspeakable can refer as much to the experience of being abused as to the other side of the equation – namely, the experience of perpetrating violence, of daring to transgress the threshold that the narrator describes as ‘the border between good and evil’. 

These questions are at the heart of a particularly troubling passage towards the end of the book. While Sinno’s narrator struggles to write a portrait of her rapist in the memoir’s first pages, she later succeeds in getting close to what might have been going on in her stepfather’s head. She does so by telling us about her thoughts and feelings as a mother. Her daughter struggles to fall asleep unless she is soothed by a parent rubbing her back and, in Sad Tiger, we learn of their evening ritual: the daughter insists and, obligingly, the mother rubs the child’s ‘smooth back. She is still tanned from the summer. She is skinny’. How easy it would be for the narrator – a parent with the complete trust of her daughter – to violate her daughter’s bodily autonomy: ‘I could sweet-talk her, make her think it’s just a cuddle, or bribe her like I do when I want her to tidy her room. The classic Saturday morning cartoon bribe. If you don’t do what I’m asking, no TV’. (Even here, the text explores another aspect common to those who have survived abuse – they regularly fear they will do what was done to them.) In this disturbing attempt at understanding the troubling mind of a rapist, we are taken into the horrifying psychological depths of the crime of paedophilic abuse, and asked to consider what it would be like to experience ‘the rush of crazed energy, the adrenaline. The sexual thrill’. 

In the original French version of Sad Tiger, the word ‘testimony’ (‘témoignage’) is repeatedly used to describe not simply the judicial act of speaking to a court of law, but also the literary act of writing about a crime, of bearing witness to an injustice. This second sense does not appear in Lehrer’s translation. When the original French refers to autobiographical writing as ‘testimony’, Lehrer opts for terms such as ‘memoir’ or ‘writing about reality’. But the dual meaning of ‘testimony’ – as a legal statement and a literary work – is arguably a central idea underpinning the book, and a feature that connects Sad Tiger to a wider canon of contemporary memoir in a post-#MeToo France.  

Sexual violence has been sparking debate in France well before the world learned of the acts committed against Gisèle Pelicot, with the publication of several books denouncing powerful public figures for committing sexual abuse. Perhaps the most famous example is Vanessa Springora’s bestselling 2020 memoir Le consentement (also translated into English by Natasha Lehrer), which describes the sexual predation and abuse that the author endured at the hands of the long-celebrated French author Gabriel Matzneff. Following the book’s publication, charges were brought against Matzneff who, ostracised by the literary community of the Parisian Left Back, chose to self-exile to the Italian Riviera. Not only did Springora’s memoir provoke great controversy in France, a nation that has long valorised sexual freedoms, at times to a problematic extent; it triggered legal reform. Springora’s book was cited by a parliamentary deputy proposing a new law that would redefine sex with a minor under the age of fifteen as rape. This wave of controversy folded into another in 2021, with the publication of Camille Kouchner’s memoir La familia grande. In it, Kouchner recounts her experience of both witnessing and keeping secret her twin brother’s childhood abuse by their stepfather, Olivier Duhamel, a high-profile public intellectual and politican. With the charges filed against him, Duhamel was forced to resign from his prestigious position as head of the body overseeing the French university, Sciences Po.  

These texts suggest that literature is not always confined to the symbolic realm of art, and is rarely cut off from social, political, and judicial spaces in society. This cross-pollination is helpful because authors can offer testimony in a way that need not bend to the requirements of judicial processes – namely, their account need not be precise, comprehensive, and linear. This isn’t to say that judicial processes should be circumvented through art. Rather, it means that survivors are able to share aspects of their embodied experience that the law struggles to recognise. Literature can, for instance, show how coercion and manipulation impact a person’s ability to offer free and informed consent; explore what it feels like to piece together traumatic memories; depict the challenges inherent in breaking the silence about sexual violence; and illustrate that other works of art can help a survivor find the strength, and words, to understand their experience. By providing a platform to expose and explore the embodied truths of surviving sexual violence, literature enacts what Leigh Gilmore in The #MeToo Effect defines as ‘narrative justice’, that is, ‘the right to be heard’ and to tell one’s story in a way that feels right to them.  

Sad Tiger thus exists within a wider canon of memoirs exploring the problem of sexual violence. But unlike her contemporaries, Sinno places great emphasis on the complexities associated with declaring that one knows the only truth of a traumatic experience. Though the book questions whether such a thing as an absolute truth even exists, it also places renewed emphasis on why it is important to treat each individual voice as something that does, in some capacity, express a truth. It’s through this commitment to uncovering different forms of the truth that Sad Tiger is a testimony in the purest sense: the book suggests that an authentic account is one that is fragmented, meandering and, at times, laden with uncertainty. This kind of account is authentic not despite its disarray but because of it.