WordSisters

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, sits prominently displayed on my coffee table. It’s not an illustration book of art, travel, or architecture. It’s not a photo book of exotic animals.

Sad Tiger is a powerful memoir that weaves Neige Sinno’s memory of sexual abuse and reflects upon literary works by authors who were abused and authors who wrote about abuse.

It’s the most complete book about abuse that I have read. It’s my story. My all-embracing 4-year-old, 9-year-old, teenager, and adult self-story.

Underlined sentences mark the early pages, but soon it became expeditious for me to place a vertical line in the margins highlighting entire passages. When I had an especially strong reaction to a passage, my vertical line became an elongated bold exclamation mark.  

Emotion would build in me, and I’d write in the margin. There was no order or plan for my discourse. A conversation with myself, my mother, a memory would drive me to write in the top, sides, and bottom margins. Words would be vertical, horizontal or slanted, near the author’s words that elicited the feelings.

I didn’t start out knowing that this book was going to be displayed on my coffee table. I didn’t intend to write or make any notations in the author’s memoir.

It was instinctive, like breathing. On the first paragraph I underlined, “Even if you’ve not experienced it, the traumatic amnesia, the bewilderment, the silence of the victim is something we can all imagine or think we can.”

In the second paragraph, when she wrote about the perpetrator’s assumed experience, I asked, Really that’s what it was like?

Her words rang true.  “… And after it’s over, getting dressed, going back to family life as if nothing had happened. And once the madness has taken hold, doing it again, doing it again and again, for years.”

I was in awe, too, that my family could go on as if nothing had happened. The sexual abuse, the violence, the awful words said quietly, shouted, or screamed. Survival was day by day, moment by moment. Wary and alert, vigilance didn’t stop the abuse. I could never escape but I could steel my body to not feel when it came. Even today, 51 years later, I can easily recall my stomach dropping and my impending sense of dread when I realized that I was trapped in a car in the middle of winter on a remote road. My older brother forced me to the back seat. We were supposed to be going to my beloved Aunt’s house—the reason I agreed that I would ride along. A gunshot sounded. No, I realized, with his weight pushing down on me, it was a tree limb snapping from the extreme cold. I don’t even remember if we made it to my aunt’s or what we did once we arrived.

I hear my brothers’ saying, Why are you still writing about this? (As if we were ever really going to have a conversation about their assaults). I answer, Fuck you. It’s mine to write. You shouldn’t have fucking raped me if you didn’t want me to write about it.

“A person rapes in order to exist,” I underlined. I have long thought that my oldest brothers raped me to have some semblance of power in the family. A response to the chaos of our life with our alcoholic father, our mother, and the on-going bedlam of being farm poor with 11 other siblings. Calamity struck every few years. Our barn burnt down when I was in 3^rd grade. A few years later, our house burnt down. It wasn’t if something was going to happen, it was always when. My belief was they raped me because they could.

I pressed pen to paper, Where were you, Mother? How could you not know? I wish someone had saved me! I wish someone cared enough. Was brave enough. Had the courage to confront what was easily seen.

In the end, I saved myself and my three younger sisters. Like the author, I reported the abuse to the police when I was 19. I was afraid that my mother wouldn’t protect them, the same as she didn’t protect me. I would never have forgiven myself if I allowed it to happen to my sisters. I was no longer at home, mothering them, protecting them.

And like Sinno, I am drawn towards books written by survivors. She says:

“Many books are published every year by survivors. Mostly fiction. Whenever I come across one, I always like to flip through it. Some are well written, some not. Either way I read them with the same eye. I am looking for a description of the facts. I want to know exactly what he did, how many times, where, what he said, and so on.” Same, I wrote in the margin.

I came across her book, Sad Tiger, in The New York Times book review section, May 2025. Sinno has said that Sad Tiger was written “out of necessity”, as an act of survival and understanding. Writing it was a way to reclaim her own story – to move from being the “object” of violence to the “subject” who names it.

House of Fire: A Story of Love, Courage, and Transformation is a book that I had to write. The sexual abuse that happened to me isn’t me. It was done to me. It doesn’t define me. With writing House of Fire and telling my story, I brought the truth into the light and claimed my freedom. I cut the cord that bound me to my family and found me.

Keeping quiet about abuse lets abusers win and minimizes your own life. Says, I’m not important. I’m not as important as the abuser. As the pedophile.

Fuck you, I say.

I love my life. There’s a deep peace in sitting on my deck, listening to chimes as leaves whisper and clouds float through the blue sky. I am in the moment, knowing my truth, living my truth, and speaking my truth.

I’m immensely proud of who I am. Who I always was. A fighter with a belief in myself.

I don’t write so that the abuse disappears. It will never disappear. It’s in my bones. My thoughts. My world. My very cells.  

An elongated bold exclamation mark highlights one of the author’s final sentences, “Like so many others I was raped, I was defiled and betrayed at an age when all you have is trust, and yet I grew up to become an adult who has not raped or defiled or betrayed another person in return.”

Same. With my wife, I’ve raised two children to adulthood. Slowly, intentionally, I made my body mine again. For so long my body was numb to pain and my tears stayed locked away. Now they flow easily. That is the work of love.

I have a coffee book that’s all about me, my travels, my journey, and it sits next to mine.

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