THE INCEST DIARY

By Anonymous

132 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $18.

You can always count on a murderer, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert declared, for a fancy prose style. As a corollary, you can usually count on the murdered (that is, the grievously harmed) for sentences that are laconic and cool to the touch.

In war stories, as in memoirs of abuse and genocide, a recitation of facts will suffice. In a new memoir, “The Incest Diary,” an anonymous writer tells the story of being raped by her father, starting when she was 3.

This prolonged sexual abuse continued throughout her childhood until she began, in a dire form of Stockholm syndrome, to crave it. Her father maintained this power over her until she was in her 20s. The author sugarcoats nothing about her ordeal and the damage done. But her memoir seeks to evoke, in a way few before it have, the transgressive rush some might find in taboo sexual behavior.

The author makes the link between speaking about war and speaking about rape explicit, but not in a way you might expect. In a car, her father asks her for a sex act while they’re looking at colleges. She recalls: “I did it and it excited me. Is it the same as Vietnam veterans getting excited when discussing the violence of war? I’m excited writing this, the way a man is excited talking about battle.”