Sad Tiger – Neige Sinno

[Seven Stories Press; 2025]

Tr. from the French by Natasha Lehrer

Sad Tiger, translated by Natasha Lehrer and released in the U.S. by Seven Stories Press, is French author Neige Sinno’s reluctant nonfiction debut. “I hope [this book] doesn’t have too many readers,” she confesses. “It would mean existing in literature not for my writing but for my subject. The thing I have always dreaded. And that it should be of all things this subject, which I did not choose, or want, or create.” The subject she means is childhood sexual assault. She writes plainly and directly about her experience, the fallout it caused within her family, and its ongoing ramifications throughout her life. In spite of her reservations about making art out of trauma, Sinno braids together personal narrative with cultural and literary criticism, analyzing the portrayal of victims and perpetrators across books and film. She toys with the nuances of genre and various storytelling forms, invoking fairy tales, poetry, and legal documents. Three successive sections are titled, “My life as a succession of news items in the local paper,” “My life as a horror film,” and “My life as an American melodrama,” reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado’s anaphoric sections (“Dream House as an exercise in point of view,” “Dream House as Inciting Incident,” “Dream House as Memory Palace”) in her memoir of domestic abuse, In the Dream House. Both authors tether the specificity of their experiences to broader motifs, asserting the insufficiency of any one form of meaning-making while suggesting a universality in their stories.

Sinno was repeatedly raped and otherwise sexually abused by her stepfather from the time she was around seven years old until her mid-teens. She moves away from their home (in a small village in the Hautes-Alpes) as soon as she can and attempts to separate herself from the specter of violation–a fruitless effort, it turns out. This revelation about the pretense of moving on comes at the beginning of the book’s second section, under the heading, “thirty years later, some observations about trauma.” Sinno says, “Nothing is ever really over, and even if you become a different person, this sliver of darkness will follow you.” The book illustrates the inescapability of the abuse for Sinno. Every choice, every outcome, in recovery as well as during the abuse, takes the shape of a double-bind. Once such a horrific evil has been visited onto someone—especially someone in the position of absolute vulnerability, as with a child—every option is tainted by that original violation. “For a person who has known only that,” Sinno says, “everything is organized around this oppression. There is no unsubjugated self, no equilibrium to which one can return once the violence has ceased.”

Sad Tiger is a formally experimental text, loosely chronological but also spiraling in on itself, dense with research, and all delivered in Sinno’s purposefully unpolished voice. The book is divided into two chapters: Portraits and Ghosts. Within those chapters, small subject headings appear every few pages, breaking the text into discrete considerations. The book does not build suspense. Its central violation is established from the very first section heading—“portrait of my rapist”—and portrayed, in a linguistic sense, as ongoing, unbounded. “It’s always the present for me,” Sinno writes. “It’s always me, it’s always now.”

While considering the life she has built for herself, Sinno references her admiration for “that beautifully wrought sentence from Jean-Paul Sartre…What matters is not what is done to us, but what we do with what is done to us.” But then she adds, “I had to acknowledge that there are fathomless differences between the possible categories of what has been done to us.” Even after Sinno’s departure, her younger half-siblings remain at home. When she finally tells her mother about the rape, she does so in order to protect the others. But her mother, too shocked to react, does not immediately leave her husband. Her mother’s reaction called to mind the news that broke in 2024 about Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. Shortly after Munro’s death, her adult daughter, Andrea Skinner, published a piece in the Toronto Star that alleged Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin, began sexually abusing Skinner when she was nine, and that even after Skinner informed Munro about the abuse, Munro chose to stay with Fremlin. Yet unlike Munro, Sinno’s mother does not stay with her husband long-term. When Sinno decides, one year after telling her mother, to go to the police, her mother joins her in filing a complaint. The police come for the stepfather, transfer him to a detention center, and he awaits his trial for the next two years.

The book is organized around the person of Sinno’s stepfather. She renders his presence and domination as suffocating. I shudder to acknowledge: that is not a metaphor. “That’s another reason why it’s hard to write about this,” she notes. Sinno repeatedly laments the unsavory nature of her topic, its sensationalism, and her concerns about the ethics of writing about rape. “The text, into which the author pours so much effort and will, years of reading, her heart and soul, is, from the very start, the abuser’s project, he is right at the heart of it, he almost predicted it, even almost hoped for it.” Her investigation into his psyche reveals someone so self-consumed that even the monstrosity of forcing himself on someone unable to resist does not truly register as harmful. During the trial, he confesses to almost everything, seeming to take a kind of abhorrent, self-reaffirming refuge in the story he has spun: “He claimed that he could not bear being rejected by a little girl, and that the only way he could get close to me was through sex […] He clung to this version.” The disconnection between the way he was publicly perceived and the great evils he committed on his stepdaughter is a fjord of bottomless bewilderment. For years, Sinno stays silent. She develops scoliosis, her body expressing the contortion required of her at home. Her stepfather–a controlling, domineering, charismatic man–manages their home via the threat of his anger. “I never said a word about the sexual abuse,” Sinno recalls. “But I fiercely criticized everything else about him…My mother told us there was nothing we could do to change him, he would never change, it was up to us to make sure he was happy.”

The trial is public and lasts for fourteen hours. I appreciate that Sinno names her political opposition to the carceral system. She enumerates incarceration’s failures to rehabilitate inmates, and she voices her opinion that imprisonment is a punishment that doesn’t match the crime. Again, she illustrates the double-bind of no sufficient options: either subject her stepfather to a system she does not trust to be effective or appropriate, or he gets to stay in dangerous proximity to her younger siblings. “We ended up going to the police,” Sinno explains, “because we couldn’t figure out any other way of getting him away from us.” The book includes photocopies of the letters Sinno and her mother sent to the police, as well as newspaper clippings that covered the trial proceedings. Sinno even tracks down the attorney who represented her, and they share a long phone call about what the attorney remembers. Sinno interrogates her own memories, inviting the reader to share in the victim’s self-doubt.

A public trial forces the people–and the reader–to look at what has been done to Sinno, to take in its repugnant specificity. Yes, there’s an indecency in a public hearing on such graphic material, but Sinno asserts that the indecency isn’t hers. “When you think about the extent of intrafamilial violence,” she writes, “you have to wonder what the notion of privacy means when we’re talking about a systemic crime committed in secret in hundreds of thousands of families. This dirty linen, this disgrace, is not mine, it is ours, it belongs to us all.” Every way of responding to childhood sexual abuse that keeps the issue private perpetuates the secrecy that keeps victims vulnerable. 

Sinno’s stepfather never stops seeing her as culpable, as the initiator. “That was the way my stepfather talked about the rape, as something that had happened to him… He was the victim,” she repeats, “and somehow I was the executioner: me, the little girl who had set off the process simply by existing.” Of course, Sinno includes his thinking not to validate his perspective—“In my mind, there is not a shred of doubt as to who is guilty,” she adds—but to illustrate how pervasive the abuser’s self-justification can become. Abuser, abused, and reader all feel the whirlpool current of blame and causation, the stepfather claiming he is helpless to resist the dynamic of seduction and rejection from the little girl, the little girl grown into a woman who cannot know what her life or personhood would have been without his stain, the reader—this reader—dumb and flummoxed by the hopelessness of it all. 

Sinno has compiled a precise and sweeping depiction of the harm wrought by childhood sexual abuse. Such a sentence almost seems like it should go without saying: who would deny its harms? And yet, we as a society are not nearly as enraged by childhood sexual abuse as we should be. “The taboo in our culture is not rape itself, which is commonplace everywhere, it is talking about it, thinking about it, analyzing it,” she writes. Numbers and statistics evaporate like steam on a mirror. “Most victims don’t press charges,” Sinno notes; “In France it’s under ten percent […] The most recent statistics indicate that 74 percent of all rape accusations, brought by both adults and minors, are dropped.” At every stage, the number of cases being pursued dwindles. For Sinno’s stepfather to actually serve jail time—five years of his nine-year sentence—is remarkable. And likely wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t confessed. 

During the trial, several people speak on behalf of the stepfather, lauding his character. “They said he was a man of consummate integrity and loyalty, a fine son, a faithful friend, a tireless worker, intrepid, even at times heroic […] I can’t help wondering,” she adds, “what they think of themselves today, twenty years on, if they ever cast their minds back to the testimony they once gave in defense of a man who had raped a child.” In the same way that her stepfather never fully recognizes her as a separate individual whose will and dignity he transgressed, the witnesses in the trial seem to be willing to overlook Sinno’s violation in favor of their own impressions. We are all hostages to our own biases and blind spots, unless we take the courageous leap of allowing ourselves to have been wrong. What are we willing to ignore in order to maintain one’s sense of being in the right?

Sinno brings a sharp eye to the dynamics of identification and empathy. Her stepfather’s crime is so horrific that it capsizes the mind. Denial overtakes curiosity and people rush to the stepfather’s defense, as an impulse to rectify their worldview. She writes about the shame that settled on her family. “People stopped greeting me in the village,” Sinno writes. Evidently, the villagers do not withhold the dignity of greeting from her condemned stepfather. In a section titled, “he has his good qualities too,” Sinno riffs on the reactions of her stepfather’s character witnesses. “Okay, so he’d done it,” she says, “but other than that he was a great guy.” 

These are the ruminations that keep sparking in my mind: I was raised in a religious tradition that taught we should forgive wrongdoers, wipe records clean—that redemption is always possible. Perhaps, spiritually, that is true, but what do I know of the material reality of redemption? Sinno does not believe in it. “In my opinion,” states Sinno, “the only honorable exit for a child rapist [is] to die of shame.” She writes about a 2017 documentary, In the Open, which focuses on a Corsican jail surrounded by sea and forest, primarily populated by those condemned for intrafamilial sexual crimes. According to Sinno, the filmmaker, Guillaume Massart, errs on the side of empathy with the abusers. The inmates are invited to share their stories. “They go on and on about themselves,” says Sinno, “about the indifference of which they are the victims.” The true victims and their stories are absent from the documentary, so those watching and listening to the plight of the incarcerated are not forced to consider the suffering they caused. Like Sinno, I am politically opposed to the prison industrial complex; I believe anyone subjected to it is a victim in some capacity. But is the victimhood of being compelled to serve an inappropriate, inhumane punishment compensatory for these kinds of crimes? “I do think there is something slightly absurd about trying to make a certain number of years in jail correspond to a crime like this, or maybe even to any crime,” Sinno writes. “What possible correlation could there be with the seven years spent torturing a child?”

Few hurry to empathize with the victim—and “victim” is a descriptor Sinno sees no honesty in rejecting. “It’s not possible to have been raped and yet not be a victim,” Sinno asserts. “A person who has been raped is a victim of rape, of an assault committed on her against her will.” Her pushback against the stigmatization of the term is rooted in a frustration with the minimization of rape. Her identification with the word victim has come at great personal and familial cost. At the trial, Sinno is asked to prove that she didn’t want her stepfather’s sexual advances and that she did not consent. The trial itself is a theater of horror. Sinno writes about the implicit expectation that she must perform her victimhood in order to indict her stepfather. “To the eyes of the jury and of the world, that fact that I’m doing okay exonerates my rapist,” she writes. Accepting her status as victim refutes a hollow, faux-triumphal ideology that purports one can ever conquer the trauma of childhood sexual assault. “The thing that’s unbearable about resilience,” Sinno writes, “is that all this suffering in the end just leads—if you’re lucky—to being normal.” For Sinno, there is no possible victory. The only truly positive outcome would involve an unraveling of time, story, experience. The best one can hope for is neutrality: that the suffering would cease. 

After serving his sentence, Sinno’s stepfather returns to society. He walks the Camino de Santiago. Meets a younger woman (about the same age as Sinno, but she is no longer a minor). “She is also deeply religious,” Sinno states. “She accepts him with her entire being, exactly as God sent him to her, with his sinful soul and his quest for redemption.” They have four children together and decide to homeschool them on a remote organic vegetable farm, which they open to local schoolchildren. The déjà-vu is sickening. But since he has served his time, and without any evidence to the contrary, “the assumption is that there has been no repeat offense. You either believe that or you can’t sleep at night.”Sinno immerses her reader in a world of no justice: where her abuser is reintegrated into society, offered a “fresh start,” and she continues to live with the trauma he inscribed on her. What should one do with such a tale? Sinno’s options have been limited since the first assault. “Aestheticizing violence, making the reader a hostage to terror, seems to me to be an artistic error,” she writes. “So what is appropriate then? Nothing, that’s the problem. I haven’t found a solution for how to talk about it.” What matters is that something be said. Sinno refuses to impose an artificial happy ending and invites the reader into the ambiguity of living with trauma. Sad Tiger extends to its reader the opportunity to witness, and to wrestle. To whom do we extend the benefit of the doubt? Whose power raises concern? And are we willing to listen to victims and set aside our preconceptions to hear their stories?

McKenzie Watson-Fore serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for MAYDAY. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Offing, Bridge Eight, Christian Century, and elsewhere. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.