Sunday book pick: An untameable pain in Niege Sinno’s memoir of childhood sexual abuse, ‘Sad Tiger’

“Innocence. That’s what there is to see, the purest innocence. And perhaps what attracts him is simply the possibility of destroying it.”

How does one talk about a memoir on childhood sex abuse? Is it possible to “rate” such a book on the scale of five? Can one say to have “enjoyed” it? Is it possible to be “moved” by a story so sordid? Can one pity the author who does not want to be pitied? Is it right to call the writer “brave”, who, without choice, had to survive her childhood? What is the right way to read such a memoir? After a point, I stopped trying to understand my relationship with the story – it was not mine; I was a voyeur. My presence was immaterial. The story exists and it will for all of eternity – I was passing it by, I got tangled in it briefly, I could shake myself off and move on. For me, the story ends on the last page. It is not my story, yet, to understand what it was trying to tell me, I had to surrender myself to it.

Descending into an abyss

Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, memoirist extraordinaire, said Niege Sinno’s memoir on childhood sex abuse is “like descending into an abyss with your eyes open”. First published in French in 2023 and translated by Natasha Lehrer in 2025, Sad Tiger is an incredible, explosive account of an adult woman writing about being sexually abused and raped by her stepfather from the ages of seven to sixteen. The beginning of the story is predictable enough – a precociously young mother, material poverty, a temperamental stepfather, too many children. Neige, the eldest daughter of her mother and also the eldest of her siblings, is most aware of her family’s strange structure. The stepfather, at the beginning of her story, is only 24. I was surprised – he was not much older than the children he was in charge of. If anything, he was young enough to remember how fragile childhood is, and the price of abusing it.

Sinno believes it was her indifference that she was being punished for – rape was the surest way of owning her; heart, mind, body, soul. “It was something serious and terrible,” she writes while recollecting the first time she was abused. The feeling preceded language, and in Sinno’s account, one is reminded of a terrible reality – the commonplaceneness of rape. The taboo, she rightly states, is not in the act itself but for the victim to “talk, think, or analyse it.” The shame – across cultures – is for the victim to bear. The abuse was worsened by her family’s material poverty – she knew reporting her stepfather would leave them “destitute”, leaving nowhere for her mother and her four children to go. These burdens are uniquely positioned in Sinno’s story, and shame, which until now was for only her to carry, was threatening to spill over. Reporting would bring humiliation upon her mother and the rest of the village too, whose most famous resident would henceforth be the rapist. The victim’s shame is put into figures – France’s dismal conviction rates for sex crimes reveal a system designed to protect the abuser. Relentless questioning, disbelieving the victim, and an intellectual romanticisation of pedophilia and related crimes make it even harder for a victim to come forward. The fact that her abuser was convicted and put behind bars, Sinno believes, is because he admitted to his crimes. “If it had been my word against his, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been believed,” she writes. The psychiatric evaluator judged her stepfather as a “narcissistic pervert with sadistic tendencies.”

Her story is interspersed with the cultural representations and understandings of rape and pedophilia. She closely reads Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, its most well-known product. Sinno stands up for the text that has been misinterpreted over and over again by assigning an erotic nature to Humbert Humbert and his teenage victim, Lolita’s relationship. This misreading has led to catastrophic results – with many movies and fiction centred around pedophilia misunderstanding the extent of abuse and power imbalance in such situations. Sinno’s qualification as a student of literature allows her to study these materials with a clinical eye and she assesses how language, metaphors, and voices shape our relationship with abuse and how we may react to them. Here emerges a person’s essential relationship with language – Sinno writes about how the abuse changed her vocabulary, making it cruder and unaccustomed to subtleties. She cannot call oral sex “lick” or “suck” as preferred by her stepfather, and instead favours the more abrasive “blow job.” There have been no attempts to give these words a “new life”; it was easier to simply “eliminate” them.

The other life

Now 44, at a distance from the lived years of childhood – the memories are always present – Sinno is able to see just how much her own sex life has been shaped by the rapes. Oral sex is not just an act of sexual service – she has been able to “perfect” it over the years, and with a partner who is not her stepfather, she has the power to spit out the semen instead of swallowing it. Her relationship with sex has changed. It grants her choice. What is often taken as granted in intimate relationships – a shared secrecy, the freedom to say no, mutual pleasure – for Sinno, are never free of traumatic childhood memories. All exercise of choice is a small release of the past. There’s an especially startling moment in the memoir when Sinno recollects how, when she was 12, in the earliest stages of awakening her awareness, she realised that what he was “doing” to her was rape. There was finally a word for it, and no more doubts that it was anything else. My heart leapt into my mouth – I was nauseous.

Not once does Sinno doubt that whoever she is, is a product of her childhood abuse. “He made my entire character, she writes, “The good and the bad. The brilliant and the terrible. I am all of these things, and everything stems from my childhood.” I tried to reconcile myself with her admission, feeling an overwhelming urge to tell her otherwise, that no, she was her own person. The past was behind her. But what is the present if not the culmination of the past? It is entwined, as are the joys and the sorrows that travel through time, perched on our backs. One cannot sever themselves from their childhood, and more so, I suppose, when you’ve survived something so monstrous – there cannot be a more formative experience. What I can only think of as an enormous act of courage, Sinno acknowledges how her existence will always be entwined with that of her stepfather, of what he did to her in the dark, the long, interminable moments they spent together, and that she will never really be able to “get over” her childhood. There simply is no way to have been raped and not be a victim – it is the plain truth. She expresses her concerns about lauding the victim who “gets over” her trauma as opposed to those who are worse for it.

Writing, or any art, really, cannot be the salve to repair what is permanently damaged. “Literature did not save me. I am not saved,” Sinno writes somewhere near the end of her memoir – and I, once again, had to take stock of my conflicting feelings. We all believe – want to believe – that something or someone can save us, rescue us from our darkest selves. Art is the antidote, or so we have been told and here is a survivor, declaring in her own book, that it is not possible to be saved. Surviving involves walking an eternal path on a tightrope. The victim and the abuser are the “same” or almost the “same shadows”. They are bound for life. This will always be true for Sinno and her stepfather.

There is no such thing as a rape “survivor”. Not once does Sinno call herself that; she is a victim – of social, judicial, and cultural apathy.

Sad Tiger, Neige Sinno, translated from French by Natasha Lehrer, Seven Stories Press.