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When I started writing She’s Such a Liar, many people—in fact, most people I talked to—told me not to waste my time. They warned me that my topic was too controversial, too uncomfortable, not likely to be taken seriously.

“Nobody’s going to believe you.”

“If what you say is true, it would have been out in the open a long time ago.”

“Who wants to read about that kind of stuff anyway?”

But their skepticism echoed something I couldn’t ignore, and I began to wonder. I knew that for centuries the medical establishment had refused to take incest seriously and had pushed the topic as far as it could into the dark, dusty recesses of an out-of-the-way closet. I also knew that when the few courageous women who had experienced incest tried to get their testimony published, they were typically discredited and dismissed, even though, deep in their hearts, they understood that the violence they experienced was not their fault. But if not theirs, whose?

At the beginning of my research, I had read an article on incest by Roland Summit, a researcher at UCLA, published in the 1970s. I taped this part of his article on my wall, directly above my desk: “We have overlooked or outrageously trivialized this subject, not because it is peripheral to major social interests, but because it is so central that we have not yet dared to conceptualize its scope.”

What Summit left unsaid, I began to uncover—and what I discovered did not so much shock me as numb me. There was a whole machinery of disbelief—sustained by institutional complicity and the strategic discrediting of those who speak—bent on preserving conventional gender hierarchy and suppressing knowledge. Testimony was reframed as unreliability, memory as distortion, pain as pathology.

When I finished writing the book and began requesting endorsements, I expected little. Given the history of dismissal surrounding incest, I braced myself for silence, at best, polite rejection. Instead, the responses overwhelmed me.

“She’s Such a Liar is a seismic indictment of the powerful cultural, medical, and political systems that have kept incest hidden for centuries…Long overdue.” —Regina Calcaterra, Esq. and author of NYT best-selling Etched in Sand 

“Clear-eyed and incisive, She’s Such a Liar reframes incest as a problem of knowledge and power—and calls for a collective reckoning with the systems that make truth dangerous.” —Jennifer Joy Fried, Ph.D., Professor Emerit, Psychology, University of Oregon 

“She’s Such a Liar…confronts the politics of trauma and shame [and] dismantles the myth of medical neutrality. This book could not be more timely.” —Dawn Skorzewski, Professor of English emerita, Brandeis University, author of An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton 

It quickly became clear that She’s Such a Liar was tapping into something long suppressed and waiting for expression.

She’s Such a Liar asks hard questions. It refuses to separate personal pain from the systems that produce, permit, and protect it. And, perhaps most importantly, it affirms what women who have experienced incest have known all along: that their experiences are real, that their understanding matters, and that their voices deserve to be heard, not silenced by institutions designed to discredit them.

So to my naysayers, I want to say thank you. You pushed me to follow the truth where it led.

In the end, writing this book was never a waste of time. It was, instead, a necessary act of naming what had been too long been suppressed.