“Because for me too, when it comes down to it, the thing that’s most interesting is what’s going on in the perpetrator’s head.” So begins “Sad Tiger,” Neige Sinno’s strange, shattering memoir of childhood sexual abuse. This slender book—iconoclastic in both form and content, and now sensitively translated into English by Natasha Lehrer—was dubbed “a literary tour de force” by French critics on its publication, in 2023, short-listed for the Goncourt, and awarded more than a dozen other prizes, including the Prix Femina and the 2024 Strega European Prize. A conundrum lies at its heart: Can—or should—evil be understood?

For Sinno, who is also a novelist, essayist, and translator, this question could not be more personal, reaching into the very core of her identity. Yet her tone, as the book opens, is coolly distant and almost conversational, inviting us to contemplate, alongside her, the unthinkable: the mind of a man who coerces a young child into sex acts; his pillaging of that child’s foundational store of trust. “With victims it’s easy, we can all put ourselves in their shoes,” Sinno writes. “The perpetrator, on the other hand, is a different story.”

Sinno’s stepfather is the man, or monster, in question. An intermittently employed mountaineering guide, ski-shop clerk, and construction worker, he began sexually assaulting Sinno when she was around the age of seven, and the abuse continued for seven years. She wants to pin him down, like a butterfly on a specimen board, to study his motivations, but any understanding of them continually eludes her. The riddle that haunts every memoirist has particularly high stakes for her. Can she separate who she is today from the circumstances that were imposed on her?

To her memories, minefields scattered with craters, she adds testimonies from other survivors, musings on the psychology of abuse and the French penal code, and a host of literary references. Her book’s title, for example, is drawn in part from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger,” in which the poet wonders at the divine “framing” of a beast capable of extreme violence. As an adult, Sinno tells us, she remains “obsessed” with the question posed in Blake’s verse. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee? . . . Am I and my rapist made from the same clay?”

A skillful reader with a very particular vantage point, she listens for the faint echoes of the nymphet’s voice in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (a novel narrated from the abuser’s perspective). Virginia Woolf’s description, in an autobiographical essay, of her response as a young girl to what Sinno calls the “first, pawing caresses” of her teen-age half brother reminds the French author of her own experiences: “a bedroom in darkness. I am woken by hands on me.” For both writers, the confusion that gripped them in those moments never lessened.

Sinno’s first-person narrator is writing from her longtime home in Mexico, which she shares with her partner and their young daughter. Yet even at that great distance from the scenes of her childhood trauma, the merest spark—being on a bus, for example, and seeing a little girl “asleep, lying with her head in a man’s lap”—could jolt her into dark thoughts. Linear time in such moments collapses for her, an experience that she finds reflected in verses by the late Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who recalls “those dark sunlit mornings / When I was a child / It was yesterday / It was a century ago.”

It was, in fact, in the spring of 1977, according to a human-interest feature in a local French newspaper, that a baby girl was born in an abandoned barn in the alpine Forest of Vars to a young couple. Idealistic bohemian dropouts from society, they gave their daughter a fanciful name: Neige, meaning “snow” in French. The birth was a rarity in this remote, rural enclave, but the journalist reports that the village mayor, perhaps taken aback by the baby’s unusual name, refused to register it. (“Sad Tiger” includes a picture of the faded press clipping.)

Two years later, Neige’s sister Rose was born; and a few years after that, the girls’ parents separated. Their newly single mother went off for a year to train as a mountain guide, leaving the girls with their gentle, ineffectual hippie father. (Sinno describes this temporary idyll with rare lyricism—“we went down to the river and threw branches into the water, then followed them as they floated off on the current”—but her beloved father’s sporadic presence in her life afterward proves a disappointment.) While Neige’s mother is away, she meets the man she would soon marry, going on to have two more children with him.

The blended family of six leads a hardscrabble, “back-to-nature” existence in the French Alps of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. They move into a ruined house at the edge of a village, camping out together in the basement while embarking on a never-to-be-completed project of home renovation. This unstable dwelling, with its crumbling walls and lack of proper bedrooms for the children, comes to stand for a far more sinister lack of boundaries.

Sinno lists the rooms of an atrocious memory palace: the blue-green carpet of an apartment corridor, or a cellar’s metal crates “filled with mountaineering equipment piled on top of each other that he laid me down on.” Then there was “the basement of the ski store where he worked,” she writes. “He was pretty brazen, a customer might have walked in at any moment.” The banal elements that she recalls—the smell of ski wax, for example—reflect the disassociation that can serve as a temporary coping mechanism for victims of trauma.

The author draws a vivid portrait of her family’s socially marginal milieu, but her rapist presents multiple challenges of perspective. He was energetic, charismatic, and handsome; he was subject to violent outbursts and wildly controlling. At last, she cuts him down to size. “For years I thought of him as godlike, larger than life,” Sinno recalls. “He seemed like a mythological creature, a Sisyphus, a Prometheus, tortured by demons. In retrospect, years later, I wonder if perhaps he was just a bit of a loser who had the gift of manipulating people and exploiting the vulnerability of someone more helpless than he.” But, then again, she asks, “Who wouldn’t rather see themselves as the victim of a Titan rather than a loser?”

At twenty-one, having long since left home for college, and driven by the desire to protect her siblings, Sinno became one of the rare victims in France to file a complaint against her rapist. Her mother, whom she had informed of the abuse a year earlier, had hesitated to leave her husband—she earned a scant living cleaning houses, and feared that breaking up the family would render her and the younger children homeless—but she joined Sinno’s complaint. Rarer still, their case proceeded to a jury trial, which Sinno agreed, unflinchingly, to open to the public. In June, 2000, her stepfather was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Sinno finds injustice in the fact that, once her stepfather completed his term—he was released from prison after five years for good behavior—society granted him the right to a second chance. Whereas for someone who was sexually abused as a child, she observes, “nothing is ever really over, and even if you become a different person, this sliver of darkness will follow you.”

There were good reasons for Sinno not to write “Sad Tiger,” she tells us, and the thought of them also haunts her book. Writing it, one senses, was a high-wire act over an abyss of pain, agitation, uncertainty, and the dread of being ignored or misunderstood. She doesn’t necessarily believe in “writing as therapy.” “And even if I did,” she adds, “the idea of healing myself with this book appalls me.”

Then there is her anxiety that the text is “from the very start, the abuser’s project, he is right at the heart of it.” It’s an uneasiness that she shares, she tells us, with the French novelist Christine Angot, who has written that her father—an intellectual, in this case—sexually abused her, starting when she was thirteen. In Angot’s autofictional novel “Le Voyage dans l’Est,” published in 2021, she describes how her father counselled her to write about the experience, even going so far as to suggest that she employ a literary style that is “a little hazy, a bit like Robbe-Grillet.”

Sinno’s book lands in the U.S. as French society continues to grapple with the fallout from a story emerging, like her own, from la France profonde, in this case, from Mazan (a small town in southwestern France): the trial and conviction of more than fifty men for the assault and rape of Gisèle Pelicot, a seventy-two-year-old mère de famille, orchestrated by her husband, who received the maximum sentence of twenty years. Her courageous decision, like Sinno’s almost a quarter century earlier, to open the trial’s doors to the public, her dignity under the intense pressures of testimony and of the defense lawyers’ attempts to impugn her reputation, has made her an international feminist icon. Her memoir, “A Hymn to Life,” will be published simultaneously in French and in twenty other languages, including English, in early 2026. Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, has accused her father of drugging and sexually abusing her, which he denies. She published her own memoir, “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again,” translated by Stephen Brown, last month.

These writers join a chorus of voices that have begun raising awareness about sexual violence and incest in France in the past few years. The journalist Charlotte Pudlowski’s podcast, the six-episode “Ou peut-être une nuit” (“Or Maybe One Night”), explored abuse that her mother suffered as a child and kept secret for decades, and its ripple effects across generations. The podcast garnered widespread attention when it first aired in fall, 2020.

The French anthropologist Dorothée Dussy’s pioneering study of incest, “Le Berceau des dominations” (“The Cradle of Dominations”), from 2013, was republished in France in 2021, with an introduction by Pudlowski. The numbers that Dussy cites still shock. She estimates that in a class of thirty fifth-grade students in France, two or three would have experienced sexual assault coming from within their family. “The taboo surrounding incest is not about committing it,” Pudlowski concludes. “The taboo is rather about speaking about it.”

Several recent literary works have also played a key role in the country’s ongoing reëvaluation of its laws surrounding sex with minors. Vanessa Springora’s subtle and wrenching memoir, “Consent,” published in 2020 and also translated by Natasha Lehrer, chronicled the author’s two-year relationship, which began when she had just turned fourteen, with a man of letters more than three times her age, identified in the book only as G. Within days, the French literary community was buzzing about Gabriel Matzneff, a celebrated and prize-winning writer who, for decades, had made no secret of his pedophilia, publishing essays and diary entries recounting his abuse of children. Matzneff’s longtime publisher, Gallimard, halted sales of his diaries, and a government stipend for writers that he received was cancelled. Legal investigations were initiated against him, and are ongoing.

And Camille Kouchner’s best-selling memoir, “The Familia Grande,” from 2021, translated by Adriana Hunter, told a story of growing up in a prominent family of freewheeling Parisian intellectuals with a terrible secret: her stepfather, a high-profile legal scholar, was sexually abusing her fourteen-year-old twin brother. The book revealed the emotional wreckage that lay just beneath the seductive, glittering surface of a certain sector of France’s progressive cultural élite. In its wake, the hashtag #MeTooInceste took off online, with thousands of testimonies, and President Emmanuel Macron vowed to tighten French laws on incest. Later that year, members of Parliament voted to establish fifteen as the legal age of consent in France. And, in 2023, an expert commission appointed by the government recommended abolishing the statute of limitations for sexual crimes involving children. Both Springora and Kouchner questioned the loosening of mores after May ’68 among a privileged class and by a generation whose assault on taboos also served as cover for crimes against children.

In the meantime, the author of “Sad Tiger” is aiming for her own quiet revolution, upending our received notions both of survival and of the distinction (particularly acute in France) between autobiographical writing and the so-called “higher” realms of literature. “Why do we think only fiction can venture into the domain of the unsayable? Writing about reality might be no more than a tool to analyze facts, but a well-honed tool cuts to the bone,” Sinno observes. “And when you reach the bone, art is never far away.” ♦