It started this way. In graduate school, while reading a Victorian novel about a father-daughter relationship, I was surprised to discover an incest theme in the book. A quick trip to the library indicated that no other scholar had yet picked this up. Thrilled by my deductive skills, I ran to my advisor and told her that I was going to write about that theme for my final paper. “No, you’re not. Go back to your classroom and get your A.” As in, don’t even think about bringing this up again. 

At home, I wondered what the big deal was. A year later, while studying with a feminist professor, I discovered that Anne Sexton’s poetry is riddled with incest. Yet no scholar had written about it. This time, my professor gave me the green light. After evaluating it, she encouraged me to submit it to the most prestigious feminist journal of the time. It was accepted immediately, but the readers asked me to reorganize three sentences into one paragraph. I sent the paper back the next morning. A week later, I received a letter from the editor-in-chief. She rejected the paper. After all, she wrote, “How can we trust anything anyone says who doesn’t know how to spell the word plagiarism?”

To say that I was puzzled would be an understatement. Why was everyone talking in tongues? I started reading scholarly articles about incest and discovered that it is the most common sexual violence crime against girls in the country—conservative data indicate 1 in 6 daughters will be incestuously abused before they’re 18, but most experts think the prevalence rate is much higher, 1 in 3 or 4. That puzzled me even more. If that was true—and it is—why was no one talking about it? Why was I being told that writing about incest was not in my best interest?  Why were even feminists shying away from it? 

After I got my degree, I wrote a novel about incest titled Surviving the Wreck. Because of my grad school experience, I chose to be very careful about how I wrote the book. For example, I never used the word “incest” in the book. Because incest is overwhelmingly a heterosexist crime, I thought I was being quite clever when I chose to submit to female editors only. But their responses only puzzled me more.

Here’s part of the first rejection I received; it’s from a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf and it typifies almost all the responses I got from female editors. “This is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in years. But I can’t argue for it in marketing; it hit me too hard.”

Those rejections only confirmed for me that incest is common and that no one felt comfortable going near it. I changed tactics and submitted the manuscript to a male editor at Henry Holt, who bought it overnight.

Surviving the Wreck was hailed as a “work of genius,” nominated for a prestigious award, and received acclaim from readers, literary critics, and even medical professionals here and in Europe. And nobody seemed to miss—or mind—that the book is about incest. Providing I wrote about it obliquely—slantwise.

Jump forward a few decades, and there I was, like everyone else, looping around the dining room table trying to figure out how to get through the COVID pandemic. One afternoon, after finishing my loops, I sat down and reflected on my past. I thought about questions as yet unanswered. In the decades between the publication of Surviving the Wreck and COVID, a lot had changed. We had started to talk about rape and wife battery, we were beginning to understand sexual violence as an inherent part of an inegalitarian, anti-feministic culture we now call patriarchy. But still, no one was talking about incest. How come? 

When I started marketing, She’s Such a Liar: Incest, Knowledge, and Power, I felt like I was back in graduate school. The first agent I submitted the manuscript to, a woman known for publishing progressive books, responded with these words: “So the question is how to write a book about incest without using the word incest. You don’t want to offend anyone’s biases.”

A TED talk coach advised me to reconsider a different project. A former student, interning at a county district attorney’s office, reported that the DA’s office never uses the word “incest,” even when the cases before them clearly involved incest. “Why not?” she asked. “We just don’t use that word.” 

Which brings me back to my COVID moment. The question I posed to myself was this: “How come nobody talks about incest?” 

What I discovered surprised me. The silence that surrounds incest has nothing to do with fear or discomfort or even I thought possibly, prudery. Instead, it has everything to do with power. If anyone lets word out about how prevalent it is, or what the institutional structures of power have done to deny and invisibilize its existence, there’s going to be quite a mess. The epistemological stakeholders in our culture, those in charge of the male-supremacist mechanisms of power, will be embarrassed. More than embarrassed. They will lose their jobs, their status in the world, and their prestige. Their respect. And they will be angry about that. And because they are so angry, they will do everything they can to suppress you, to shut you up. Tell you that you are a liar. Talk about how incest is part of patriarchy’s armamentarium of tactics used to control and subordinate girls and young women, and they will get even nastier.  

Bring incest out of the closet, talk about how common it is, and those words will have a tornado-like effect on the powers that be. 

And that’s why I chose to write about patriarchy’s millennia-old cover-up of incest.

To blow the roof off the house.