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Parts work is a type of therapy that assumes that all people have different parts of their personality, and that these parts can have conflicting strategies, wants, and fears. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a popular type of parts work. Janina Fisher puts forward another modality of parts work in her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors that draws upon IFS, the theory of structural dissociation, and other modalities, and is directed at people with varying degrees of structural dissociation due to trauma. Structural dissociation means that the parts of the personality have become increasingly separate, differentiated, and dissociated from each other.

Both IFS and Fisher’s model posit that each person has a self that is less fragmented, more whole. In IFS this is called the Self. In Fisher’s model she calls it the Going On With Normal Life part. An important distinction between the two frameworks is that IFS assumes that the Self “knows what to do.” When you are in Self, you will feel open and kind toward the parts, and you will have an intuitive sense of how to interact with them. While IFS posits that the Self has inherent traits that exist inside everyone, Fisher’s model assumes only the potential for those traits. Because Fisher’s model is directed at people with complex developmental trauma, she allows for the reality that many people have not actually developed these traits even in their Going On With Normal Life part because they did not receive the basic parenting needed to activate those qualities.

Both IFS and Fisher’s model have a concept called unblending. We are “blended” with a part when we identify with the part and experience the part’s emotions and perspectives as “ours.” A huge component of parts work is developing dual awareness: being aware of the part’s feelings and perspective while staying grounded in the Self (or Going On With Normal Life part — I’m going to mostly use “Self” from now on for ease). When we are blended with a part we are hijacked by the part’s intense emotions and our prefrontal cortexes are not active. When we unblend and ground in the Self, our prefrontal cortexes wake up and we are able to compassionately listen to the parts without being hijacked by or identifying with the part’s intense emotions. Because the parts and the Self share the same body, and because we have spent so much of our lives blended with parts, it can be very difficult to discern when we are in a part and when we are grounded in the Self. In order to build the skill of unblending we must be able to tell the difference between Self and parts.

In IFS the difference between Self and parts is presented as fairly obvious. IFS has a concept called the 8 C’s of Self: compassion, curiosity, courage, clarity, creativity, connection, confidence, calm. When these traits are present, IFS makes the assumption that we are in Self. Fisher’s model complicates this a bit because she does not assume that traumatized people have necessarily been able to develop the full expression of Self. She distinguishes between the Going On With Normal Life part and what she calls Wise Mind. Wise Mind is more closely correlated with the IFS idea of Self and the Wise Mind qualities may be more or less present when the Going On With Normal Life part is driving.

In incestuous or otherwise abusive families, there is a very common dissociative split based on the fundamental dilemma for children in those families. Gabor Maté argues that the often irreconcilable choice between attachment and authenticity is at the heart of dysfunction in our world. In order to maintain attachment relationships, we are expected to suppress our authenticity. This dilemma is particularly pronounced for abused children who rely on their attachment relationships to caregivers for survival, and who will be punished or neglected for authentic expressions of fear, disgust, anger, or sadness, both in general, and in particular, in response to the abuse. The child has an unsolvable problem: she must maintain closeness and win the favour of her abusers in order to have her basic needs met, but she must fight, flee, or shut off awareness and sensation in order to survive the abuse. The answer to this unsolvable problem is dissociation. Parts of her will be in charge of maintaining attachment, and parts of her will hold the exiled “animal defence drives” of fight, flight, freeze, and collapse. Parts of her will work hard to love and empathize with her abusers and parts of her will reject her need for attachment and insist that she “doesn’t need anyone.” I call this classic dissociative split the “Good Sister / Bad Sister” split, after the Hole song by that name. (Obviously this split happens to boy children too, though the gendered socialization which encourages girls and women to identify with “Good Sister” strategies adds a layer of complexity.)

Both Good Sister and Bad Sister strategies are dissociative strategies. Neither set of strategies flows from Self. Good Sister strategies include: people pleasing, empathy with no boundaries, endless inexhaustible compassion, extreme feelings of guilt and shame for having or wanting basic boundaries, being parentified, predicting and adapting to other people’s mood and emotions, repressing internal sensations, emotions, needs, and boundaries, and over responsibility. Bad sister strategies include: rage, extreme emotions, “splitting,” shutting off empathy, “acting out,”drinking, drugs, self-injury, compulsive sexuality, and suicidality, suppressing attachment needs, hyper independence, numbing and sensation seeking behaviours, anti-social behaviours, cruelty, and violence. Look at both of these lists and tell me: Which set of strategies is more likely to be perceived as healthy? Which set of strategies is more rewarded in society? Which set of strategies is more expected of women? Which set of strategies is more likely to be identified as a part and which set of strategies is more likely to be confused with the Self?

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I am no stranger to talking about controversial things on the internet. In fact, it is a big part of my job to say necessary and difficult things out loud, even when people find those things challenging. Anyone is familiar with my work is familiar with being challenged, and familiar with me writing about topics that are difficult to read about.

I have written about incest my entire career. The first writing I ever published about incest was in my very first zine, Glitterduck, published in the year 2000, when I was thirteen years old. Over the last few years, I have started writing in a lot more detail and specificity about what happened to me in my incestuous family, including the sexually abusive behaviours of my father, and the role of my mother in facilitating the abuse and demanding my silence about it. Finally, last summer, I made the decision to publicly name my famous feminist mother, Andrea O’Reilly, and to call on the field of Motherhood Studies to grapple with the reality that one of their most foundational scholars played an active role in demanding her daughters’ submission to and silence about incestuous childhood sexual abuse.

I have been treated as crazy many times in my life. I am the “identified patient” in my family. I am the scapegoat. I am the crazy alcoholic with multiple suicide attempts and psych ward stays under my belt. I am also the cycle breaker: the only member of my family willing to face reality. I am punished, exiled, and called crazy for doing so. I have never shied away from the “crazy” archetype. I insist that “crazy” behaviours are actually very necessary, and wise, survival behaviours. And the force necessary to break cycles of intergenerational incest often requires that you go fucking crazy.

When I was publicly expressing my rage and heartbreak about my mother’s complicity in the sexual abuse I experienced and her repeated attempts to silence me by threatening me and pathologizing me, when I was demanding out loud and in public that the “nice feminists” who built their careers on my mother’s work, listen to my testimony, I was very aware that I appeared crazy to a great many people. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t had a drink since 2012. It doesn’t matter that I run a successful business and have a successful career. It doesn’t matter that I pay my taxes and my bills, that I have figured out how to be an adult despite the severe neglect and trauma my parents and other relatives inflicted on me. None of this matters, because breaking the taboo of speaking about incest is, itself, still coded as crazy.

During this period of public testimony, someone I know online, a fellow incest survivor and a therapist, slid into my DMs. I’m sharing what she said to me, with permission.

This message was difficult to receive but I still appreciate the honesty. Anyone who has spoken about incest knows what it feels like to receive these responses and to feel these responses hanging in the air even when no one says them out loud. It takes courage to admit when we notice automatic patterns within ourselves that uphold systems we want to see dismantled.

Incest is a family system and a specific form of complex intergenerational trauma. It is requires dissociation within all members of the family and even within the larger culture to carry on without challenge. The automatic reflex to look away, to feel uncomfortable, to feel that the survivor is being “unhinged” or “losing it,” or doing something wrong by telling the truth about what happened to her, is part of how incest works. We are more uncomfortable receiving testimony about incest than we are about knowing that incest is really happening.

While I appreciated the honesty of this DM, it also made me feel so fucking lonely. It is so fucking lonely to do this work in public. It is so fucking lonely to know that so many people feel a reflex to join my mother in silencing me, that so many people would honestly rather I don’t talk about the chronic abuse that literally damaged my brain and body in severe and ongoing ways, robbing me of so many of the simple joys of being human. It is so difficult to feel the entire field of Motherhood Studies rally around my mother by dismissing my testimony as “personal issues” while even my supporters feel physically uncomfortable about what I am doing. It is more stigmatized in our culture to be an incest survivor than an incest perpetrator.

Recently, I was a headliner for a literary open mic. I wanted to read stuff I’ve been working on recently and most of what I am working on recently is about incest. I am very aware of the extremely intense feeling in the room when I choose to read stuff about incest. After going through several pieces, I decided on pieces that only lightly touched on incest. Since the audience was not just “my fans,” I wanted to be sensitive to the fact that not everyone was expecting such intense subject matter.

Right before I was to go up and read, a guy got up to read a piece for the open mic. He read an absurdist short story in which a brother and a sister have a sexual relationship. The story was presented as “funny,” “shocking,” and “bizarre.” It explicitly described incest between teenaged siblings, presenting it as “consensual,” while providing no analysis and demonstrating no awareness of the reality that incest between siblings happens as the result of sexual abuse perpetrated by adults. I felt like I was going to throw up and had to go to the bathroom to cover my ears until it was over. I could hear the laughter of the crowd.

Incest is everywhere in pornography. In fact, if you try to find resources about incest online you will inevitably find pornography. Incest frequently appears in art and literature as “consensual”: adult daughters dating their fathers, siblings having sexual relationships. These works are sometimes funny and absurdist, sometimes shocking and edgy. They never have any understanding or analysis about what incest actually is: a very specific form of intergenerational trauma, dissociation, and child sexual abuse. These stories, which describe incest in detail yet remove it from its political context and erase the reality that incest is ALWAYS traumatic, are far more welcome in public spaces than actual testimony or political theory about incest.

I can’t tell you the number of times people have joked to me or said to me in passing that the queer community, or some other enmeshed group, is “incestuous.” It always makes me want to throw up. We need to culturally resist the use of “incest” as a symbol for anything other than incest itself. Testimony about actual incest is still way too silenced and taboo for us to allow people to inaccurately throw around the word “incestuous.” I promise you that the queer community is not incestuous.

In order for us to abolish incest — and that is the goal — we must be able to talk about incest in public, whenever it is relevant, and we must be able to talk about incest politically. We need to face the impulse inside ourselves to treat incest survivors as crazy. We need to notice the way that the system of incest tries to make us all complicit in its perpetuation, including those of us who are, ourselves, incest survivors. We need to stop protecting ourselves from the reality of incest, especially those of us who are not incest survivors. Being uncomfortable hearing about incest is the same as being uncomfortable hearing about racism, gendered violence, war, genocide, or animal agriculture. We don’t actually have the right to look away and protect our own feelings at the expense of the victims of these crimes.

If you are not an incest survivor, I invite you to speak about incest with the people in your life. You actually don’t need to know a survivor personally in order to care about the sexual abuse of children (and, I promise you, you do know a survivor, probably more than one). I call upon you to talk about incest politically, to discuss it in your political circles, to read political theory on the subject the way you do about any other political issue. I encourage you to see survivors who share our testimony as doing important political work, not having a mental breakdown. Because that is what we are doing. Speaking about incest is always a political act. We are not fucking crazy. What is crazy is that we were sexually abused by our family members.

This substack hosts two monthly zoom meetings for paid subscribers! On the second Saturday of the month at 5pm EST we will have a writing group with writing prompts, time for writing, and the opportunity to share your writing. On the last Sunday of the month at 5pm EST we will have a book club where we will discuss a mix of memoirs and weird fiction (and maybe sometimes other stuff). There is also a telegram group where you can chat with other participants, discuss books, and share writing. All the groups are drop in / optional. You can come to just the book club, just the writing club, or a mix of both. Meeting aren’t recorded because I want people to feel free to share openly.

April 11th, 5pm EST, Writing Club:

Just bring yourself and something to write with.

April 26th, 5pm EST, Reading Club:

This month’s book is Wild Seed by Octavia Butler.

Find the zoom links and telegram chat here.

A classic cancel culture episode. Clementine and Jay are joined by conflict mediator and zinester Juno Aventurine to talk about the relationship between trauma and cancel culture, the shadowiest of shadow parts, and the moral ambiguity of the human animal. We also talk about the stubborn spectre of identitarianism and the trials and tribulations of exiting social justice world. Listen to the episode here.

Order my new book, Fucking Magic, here.

Order my new book, L’art oublié de baiser, here.

Pre-order my forthcoming book, Love Without Emergency, here.

Order my zines and books here (shipping is currently open).

Read my secret online diary here.

What I’m reading lately:

Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth

Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

Moi aussi je voulais l’emporter par Julie Delporte

A Hymn to Life by Gisele Pelicot

The Good People Will Destroy Us by Juno Aventurine

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors by Janina Fisher

Clementine Morrigan is an underground writer, cultural change maker, moral philosopher, and brazen truth teller. She is the author of numerous zines and books, including the cult classic zine Love Without Emergency, which will be released as a book with Microcosm Press in 2027. Her popular zine series Fucking Magic was released as a book with Revolutionaries Press in 2025. She co-hosts the podcast Fucking Cancelled with Jay Lesoleil. Her work is known for its unflinching engagement with taboo and difficult topics. She works for a world where the dignity of all beings is recognized and protected.

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My memories going back quite early, to maybe 5 or 6 years old, are doubled. Two little girls. Inside each of these girls was a system of parts, a system of strategies, and each constellation of parts was protecting against what that little girl could not afford to know. These constellations of strategies, repeated over and over again, formed the basis of a personality. The two little girls grew up, had experiences, tried hard not to know what they could not know, and whenever it was necessary, whenever the knowledge was donning, bearing down, they would switch.

I always said I didn’t have amnesia because I didn’t lose time. But in fact there are many ways to forget, many ways not to know. There are many ways to smooth the transition of two girls living one life. It isn’t always seamless, but the dissociation blurs the edges. I understand why it feels like a haunting. To know that the other you made these decisions, to find yourself inside an unfamiliar life that you would not have chosen. To arrive at the consequences of actions that make no sense to you.

Janina Fisher says that the symptoms tell the story better than you can. What a relief to finally stop trying to prove something so obvious as to be undeniable. I read a brilliant writer recently who described denial as an active form of dissociation. What a gorgeous insight. My family fortifies the dissociation. They collude with it. They insist upon it. The difference between them and me is that I am doing everything in my power to face the truth. No matter what it costs me.

These two little girls grew up to be women and they have each had their own lives, inside the same life, inside the same body.

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Order my new book, Fucking Magic, here.

Order my new book, L’art oublié de baiser, here.

Pre-order my forthcoming book, Love Without Emergency, here.

Read my secret online diary here.

When I was 24 and recently out of an extremely violent abusive relationship that ended with stalking and police involvement, I started calling the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre a lot. Not only was there the trauma from this recent relationship, but there was all the other trauma I had no idea how to deal with: my incestuous sexually abusive family, and the many physical and sexual assaults I experienced as a street involved alcoholic. Because I was a psychiatric survivor, I was terrified of being locked up again, and I had no idea how to access the help I clearly needed. Things were at a rock bottom and I didn’t know what to do. Calling the Toronto Rape Crisis line was my only recourse but it wasn’t enough.

One day I searched the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre on Google Maps and rode my bicycle there. It was in a weird and difficult-to-bike part of Toronto filled with overpasses. I got off my bike at the building but I couldn’t find a way inside. I called them on the phone to announce that I was here and I needed help. They told me the address was just their offices. They didn’t actually provide in person services. I started screaming at the woman on the phone, telling her that I was outside and I needed help. She got me to calm down enough to explain my situation to her. She gave me another address: The Barbra Schlifer Clinic, an organization offering services for domestic violence survivors. She told me to bike there and tell them the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre sent me. I did exactly that.

I was able to access free, non-psychiatric therapy at the Barbra Schlifer Clinic. This was the absolute turning point in my life. Within six months of therapy I gave up drinking and started to go to AA. I was finally receiving the help I desperately needed. This changed everything in my life and sent me on a path that took me away from chronic violence and chaos toward the life I have today. It only happened because I was crazy enough to bike to the Toronto Rape Crisis centre and scream at them to fucking help me.

A lot of really bad things have happened to me in my life. Not only do I have the foundations of incestuous childhood sexual abuse, a patriarchal raging father, and a narcissist mother, but I got pretty much all the possible bad outcomes from these traumas: alcoholism, addiction, poverty, chronic violence, psychiatric incarceration, self injury, suicide attempts, chronic pain, chronic illness, and so on. The trauma just kept multiplying and adding up. Then, after dragging myself out of a literal gutter and building some degree of stability for myself, I was cancelled in a spectacular fashion, for no fucking reason, and lost almost all my friends, my community, and my reputation, as well as being subjected to dehumanizing and sometimes violent harassment from strangers, for over 5 years.

It is that drive in me, that energy that caused me to jump on my bicycle, ride to the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre, and demand they help me, that saved my life time and time again. It is the reason I have survived such extreme adversity. It is the reason I have everything good that I have in my life today. It is the reason I am not dead. It is also the reason why I am so chronically hated, exiled, and scapegoated, in my family of origin and in the larger culture. I refuse to lie down and take it. That drive is called the fight response.

Like most people I have multiple survival strategies. My avoidance is the flight response. My chronic dissociation is the freeze response. My conflict avoidance is the fawn response. Because of my structural dissociation, the range of my different strategies is more pronounced than in many other people. But there is no denying that I have a very strong dose of the fight response.

Recently in therapy I was lamenting on my chronic role as the scapegoat, how the way I am treated by the larger culture mirrors exactly the way I am treated in my family of origin. I was saying that if I had just retreated when I was cancelled, hung my head in shame and gone quiet for a few years, the outcomes probably wouldn’t have been so bad. Hardly anyone can remember why I was originally cancelled, and when I tell them it’s hard to believe because it’s so fucking stupid. But I didn’t lie down and disappear. I kept my head up. I insisted that I didn’t do anything wrong, because I didn’t, and that the dehumanizing harassment and social exile I was being subjected to was, in fact, the abusive behaviour. I became an outspoken voice against cancel culture on the left, giving hope and an alternative to suicide to a great many people, and I was permanently branded as a bad guy. Now anyone can say anything about me. It doesn’t need to make sense. There doesn’t need to be any evidence, or even an identifiable accuser. I am banned, blacklisted, and threatened. People hold meetings to discuss whether I can be invited to a party. Scarlet letter on my chest.

Similarly, in my family of origin, being the whistleblower on the abuse and dysfunction makes me the bad guy. Because I will not lie down and accept the sexually abusive behaviour of my father, or the fact that my narcissist mother who allowed me to be sexually abused and threatened to sue me for writing about it is a celebrated scholar of feminist motherhood, because I insist on telling the truth and being in reality, I am permanently branded as the bad guy. I am called a liar, delusional, and mentally ill, on top of the accusations that I’m selfish and ungrateful which I received all throughout my childhood. I am blocked and cut off. I am dehumanized and denied empathy. I am the scapegoat.

I said to my therapist: It’s the same in both cases. I am scapegoated and hated because I won’t lie down and take it. She said: Yes, because you have a fight response.

Her response made me think about how much of a role my fight response has played in shaping outcomes in my life, both in the ways that it very clearly saved my life, and in the ways that it made everything harder by inviting the ire and malice of so many. It also made me realize how little therapeutic resources I have seen for those with a primary fight response. There seem to be endless workshops and instagram posts about melting the freeze response or overcoming the fawn response but there seems to be almost nothing on working with the fight response.

When I got home I duckduckgoed something about working with the fight response. The first thing that came up was a passage from Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. I remembered reading the passage when I read the book several years ago.

“Unlike the other 4Fs, fight types assess themselves as perfect and project the inner critic’s perfectionistic processes onto others, guaranteeing themselves an endless supply of justifications to rage. Fight types need to see how their condescending, moral-high-ground position alienates others and perpetuates their present time abandonment.”

Rereading this passage I distinctly remember my experience of reading it years ago, and choosing subconsciously to identify away from being a fight type, focusing more on the parts of me that lean toward freeze and fawn strategies. There is no recognition here of what is brilliant, life saving, and necessary in the fight response (all survival responses have aspects that are brilliant, life saving, and necessary). I find the way Walker talks about fight types to be significantly less compassionate and empathetic than the way he talks about other types. He also calls the fight type “the narcissistic defence” conflating all fight types with narcissism, which I don’t think is accurate. I am not a narcissist. I definitely don’t, and never have, assessed myself as perfect (and to be honest, I don’t think narcissists assess themselves as perfect either. The underlying emotional experience of narcissism is shame).

Fight types are the most likely to experience scapegoating and rejection by their families and by society. Fight types are also the most likely to have the drive and willingness to face adversity head on, making their own recovery and a collective reckoning with abuse and dysfunction more likely. Fight types change things and make things happen. Fight types refuse to submit. Like all survival strategies, the fight response can be expressed in functional and dysfunctional ways, but the fight response is not inherently dysfunctional or narcissistic. And the “present time abandonment” that fight types experience is not necessarily a result of their own dysfunctional behaviour. Sometimes it is the result of their refusal to accept the dysfunctional behaviour of others.

Fight types, like all survival strategies, deserve resources to help us lean into our strengths, avoid dysfunctional expressions of the strategy, and, in the case of fight types in particular, deal with the rejecting responses of families and societies who do not want to deal with whistleblowers. The shaming and scapegoating of the fight response can lead to fragmentation, both culturally and in our individual psyches. Learning how to face threat and injustice head on is a healthy skill set that benefits everyone and does not have to be dysfunctional. When wielded with skill, the fight response is a powerful force of transformation in the world. Women in particular would benefit from learning to strengthen the fight response. Gabor Maté notes in The Myth of Normal that women make up 80% of the population who suffer from autoimmune disorders (I fall among them) and that outcomes for autoimmunity improve when skills for assertiveness are developed.

I also think we need to look at the connection between the scapegoat and the fight response. In dysfunctional family systems, the scapegoat is the family member who begins to name and resist the family dysfunction. This usually takes the form of the fight response. The scapegoat begins to resist, to act out, to get angry. The scapegoat is the one who will not submit, who will not act like things are fine when they are not fine. The scapegoat is then treated as the problem. As Dorothée Dussy points out — families would rather have a crazy liar in the family than an incest perpetrator in the family. This dynamic plays out in all dysfunctional families, not just incestuous ones. The scapegoat is the whistleblower. She becomes the scapegoat when the family chooses to blame and reject her for telling the truth.

I was recently looking into the origins of the scapegoat concept. I came across this on Wikipedia: “A scapegoat is one of a pair of goats used in the Yom Kippur Temple service during the era of the Temple in Jerusalem. The scapegoat had a band of red wool placed on it, and was then released into the wilderness, taking with it all the sins and impurities of the people as an act of symbolic atonement. The other goat was sacrificed.” I was deeply affected reading this passage. I had no idea that the scapegoat is one of a pair of two goats. The scapegoat is blamed and exiled. The other goat is sacrificed. This maps onto the dynamics in dysfunctional families and cultures exactly. While it can feel like there is no worse outcome than the dehumanizing blame and exile of the scapegoat experience, it is in fact better than the alternative. The bad sister is rejected and blamed, but the good sister is sacrificed. The whistleblower is exiled, but the one who complies must surrender their autonomy and authenticity.

I love my fight response. I am not exaggerating when I say it saved my life. And while the path of standing up for myself has proven to be an extremely difficult one, I would not trade this timeline for the one where I laid down and took it, in any chapter of my life. While being cancelled has been brutal beyond comprehension, I grew so much in my strength, authenticity, and power by refusing to submit. While being rejected by my family of origin has been brutal beyond comprehension, I grew so much in my strength, authenticity, and power by refusing to submit. My ability to express my fight response appropriately has definitely grown as I have grown in my recovery but I do not think my screaming at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre volunteer was the wrong move. Anyone who works with traumatized populations needs to be able to handle a fight response directed at them.

So much advice about survival strategies seems to be about leaning into the opposite. So fawn types should learn to be more assertive and fight types should learn to be less angry. And this type of advice can definitely be useful sometimes. But I actually think that my fight response, healthy though it is, has barely scratched the surface of my reservoir of rage. And this is not dysfunctional or inappropriate rage. The rage I have buried inside me, enormous as it is, is the exact right proportion to the violence, violation, and humiliation that I have been made to endure, and to the brazen cruelty, domination, and destruction of the most sacred happening everywhere in the world. It is not that I need to be less angry, but that I need teachers and guides for how to relate to, express, and use this anger is healthy, helpful, and functional ways.

I would not be where I am without my fight response. I have many other survival strategies but it is my fight response that gives me the power and energy I need to make change. My stubborn refusal to lie down, my perseverance in the face of enormous adversity, these are the qualities that have allowed me to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. For those of us facing the daunting task of recovering from complex trauma, channeling the power of the fight response can be necessary and life saving. It can be the make or break ingredient because it can give us the power and momentum needed to overcome. I do not need to learn to let go of or move away from my fight response. What I need is to learn how to take care of myself, how to rest and recuperate, after expending enormous energy fighting seemingly impossible battles. What I need is gentleness and kindness, a place to rest — things very rarely offered to the scapegoated fight types.

The next book club meeting will be February 22nd at 5pm EST. We will be discussing Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.

And… big announcement! The book club is branching out to include a monthly writing club! All sessions are drop in / optional. You can come to just the book club, just the writing club, or a mix of both. There is a telegram chat to keep in touch with participants, discuss books, and share writing. Come be nerdy with us.

Since I don’t want to clog your feed by posting every time there is a meeting, I am asking that you add the dates to your calendar, and come to this page to find the zoom links. You can find a permanent link to the reading and writing club in the navigation bar above. I will post reminders of the dates when I publish essays.

The first writing club meeting is February 14th at 5pm EST.

What I’m reading lately:

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson

Something Bright, Then Holes: Poems by Maggie Nelson

Pieces You’ll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali

Clementine Morrigan is an underground writer, cultural change maker, moral philosopher, and brazen truth teller. She is the author of numerous zines and books, including the cult classic zine Love Without Emergency, which will be released as a book with Microcosm Press in 2027. Her popular zine series Fucking Magic was released as a book with Revolutionaries Press in 2025. She co-hosts the podcast Fucking Cancelled with Jay Lesoleil. Her work is known for its unflinching engagement with taboo and difficult topics. She works for a world where the dignity of all beings is recognized and protected.

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Refer a friend

Give a gift subscription

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Make a One Time Donation

Subscribe to Fucking Cancelled

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Order my new book, Fucking Magic, here.

Order my new book, L’art oublié de baiser, here.

Pre-order my forthcoming book, Love Without Emergency, here.

Read my secret online diary here.

My triumph is my incomprehensible loss. My self is split along an intractable dilemma. The problem is unsolvable no matter how many times I have tried.

The dog-cops tried to give me an $800 ticket for having Clover off leash in the park we always play in. I lied to get out of it, saying I don’t actually live in this city. I was successful in my deceit but now we have to avoid the park for an unknown amount of time. This inconvenience adds itself to a seemingly endless list of little irritations, all of them stacking on top of the incomprehensible tragedy at the centre of my life.

We find a ruelle to play ball in for now. The buildings act as barriers keeping her safe from the street, and it’s a ruelle few cars pass through. Day after day as I drag myself through depression, pain, grief, I take clover to the ruelle and throw the green tennis ball into the bright white snow.

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Thirteen year old girls hold the silence as the question burns the air.

They’re holding back their laughter at my pause.

I can tell from their faces, the answer should be an easy one

but I don’t fucking know.

I don’t fucking know and I am almost at my breaking point.

It has already been three years of knowing I don’t know,

three years of secret diary entries and stolen glances

and the recognition that I am not like them.

The silence is going on for too long.

“Joshua Jackson.” I say, not at all sure of myself.

They burst out laughing in unison.

“See I told you — lesbian.”

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Order my new book, Fucking Magic, here.

Order my new book, L’art oublié de baiser, here.

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Read my secret online diary here.

The other day I was in my local cafe ordering coffee and two women turned to me and asked me if I teach workshops about bisexual women dating women (lol). We got into a really sweet conversation about the worries and barriers one of them was facing in trying to date women. Here are the zines and workshop that gave me this reputation.

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During the conversation she shared with me that she has a relationship with my parents, and that she hoped this wouldn’t impact our ability to have a relationship. I told her that I understood the desire to stay connected to family, that I have tried many times to have a relationship with my parents, and that I didn’t judge her for it. I also told her that it worried me because I do not believe my father is a safe person. I shared with her all the relevant information about my father: As a child he screamed at my sister and I if we resisted, ran, cried, or expressed fear about our grandfather’s terrifying sexual behaviour toward us. As a child, I had sexual fear of my father, so much so that I rolled off the bed and slept on the floor when I had to share a bed with him. When my sister was child, she saw him masturbating with the door open, looking at pornography on the family computer, and when he saw her as he said was “Go back to bed.” I was left with the responsibility of dealing with my little sister’s fear and confusion about what she saw. When I was 17 and drunk out of my mind, being taken away from my parents’ house by a cop in an ambulance to the psych ward, I stood between my father and the cop, pointed at my father, and said “He’s a fucking pedophile!” No one followed up with me about what I said. My father told me, when I was 18, that he didn’t know why I was so upset about what my grandfather did to (hold me down forcibly and tongue kiss me against my will when I was 12), because his aunt did the same to him and he is fine. My mother insists that the “slippery slobberies” (the “game” where my grandfather would regularly forcibly lick the children’s faces and simulate making out with us) was “normalized as a Conlin game” and that all the Conlin men did this, and somehow this is supposed to be reassuring. When my sister was a teenager, after I had moved out, my father told her that she was his favourite and I was our mother’s favourite, gave her a cd for no reason, and started standing outside her bedroom at night while my mother was travelling and they were alone in the house together. My sister begged me, when she was 16, to take her from the house because she was so afraid of my father, and I did. When I told my mother this, she attacked me and called me delusional and a liar. When I wrote about this my mother threatened to sue me. My father has always spoken positively about my grandfather, even after I got the police involved when I was 15. He has never said that what his father did was wrong. He refused to go to therapy even when I said it was a necessary condition for having a relationship with me.

I told my cousin that incest is a family system and that I have good reason to believe my father is dangerous. I told her that incest and child sexual abuse are overlapping but not the exact same thing: incest perpetrators are often sexually violent and invasive with adult family members as well as children, therefore the threat has not passed simply because you’ve grown up. I told her that my father is sneaky and subtle, but that he is an incest perpetrator. After I said this, I watched the expression on her face that tells me a dissociated reality is surfacing. She told me that recently, while she was visiting my parents, she went to bed and then got up again to go to the bathroom. When she left the bedroom, she saw my father masturbating in the living room. My parents’ house is very ope concept with the hallway that lines the bedrooms overlooking the living room. The living room can be seen from practically everywhere else in the house. It is the least private place imaginable. Despite everything I already know about my father, this was a punch in the stomach. I was expecting to receive disclosures about the sexual abuse in the generation above my father. I was not expecting to receive a disclosure about my father’s current, active sexually abusive behaviour. I watched my cousin struggle with the realm of unreality. She told me it was probably an accident. I asked her if she would masturbate in the living room while family was visiting. She said no. She said maybe he forgot she was visiting — eve though they had just been hanging out. My father does not have dementia. His memory is fine. But in incest families, everyone reaches for any explanation, no matter how improbably, except for the obvious one. She told me that everyone “gets one.” As in one example of behaviour like this can be interpreted as a mistake. I don’t agree with that. I think all incest behaviour needs to be taken seriously, because there is always more. But given the history I described above, there is no way this can be described as an isolated incident.

After the call, I was deeply shaken. My entire family treats me like I’m delusional for saying that my father is sexually abusive. My mother outright calls me a liar and delusional. She has also literally said the words “Just because your grandfather did that doesn’t mean you have the right to drag your father into this.” My sister now says she doesn’t remember him standing outside her bedroom, or telling me that, but says nothing when I ask her why I moved her out of the house when she was 16 and I was 19. My brother asked me what exactly I am accusing our father of and then never responded to me again when I told him. I worked with an organization that does facilitated dialogue with incest families and invited my family to a facilitated dialogue but they refused to participate. No one will talk to me about my father’s behaviour or even entertain the idea that anything is amiss. I have to carry the weight of reality all alone and fight through my own intense incest brainwashing and dissociation. I felt for years that I “didn’t have enough evidence” to make such a serious accusation, even though I remember the terror on my teenaged sister’s face. For years I wondered if I was, as my mother insisted, just transferring the fear of my grandfather onto my father. It took so much for me to fight my way into reality and insist that yes, my father also displays incestuous behaviours. But even then, I was not ready for the revelation that in 2025 he is masturbating in the living room while his cousin is visiting.

After I absorbed the shock, I realized that I needed to warn people. I messaged my sister and another cousin who I know has a relationship with my parents. Both of them refuse to talk to me about the abuse in our family, but I needed them to know because they both stay over at my parents’ house. The fact that my father masturbates in the living room while family is visiting is a safety issue. I sent a message to both of them saying as much. The next day, my cousin messaged me to say that she assumed our conversation was confidential and that I had violated her trust by sharing this information within the family. She told me that my actions had caused ruptures in her relationships within the family that she is now trying to repair, and that she does not share my interpretation of my father’s actions. She said “I never experienced anything incestuous from your dad.” I replied and told her: Masturbating in the living room while family is in the house is objectively sexually abusive and incestuous behaviour. This is an objective fact and not a matter of opinion. The information must be shared because it is a safety issue. People who stay at my parents’ house need to know that they are at risk of witnessing my father masturbating. Expecting me not to share that information is expecting me to take part in the incest family system by hiding and protecting sexually abusive behaviour. My cousin has chosen to end her relationship with me and continue her relationship with my parents. I told her that it’s extremely dysfunctional that she considers it more acceptable for a family member to masturbate in front of her than for another family member to simply speak about the fact that that happened.

I have since messaged several family members: my brother, my mother, two of my father’s sisters, and one of my mother’s sisters who has a close relationship with my parents, telling them what my father did, how it fits into the existing patterns of incest in our family, and how it is dangerous, abusive, sexually invasive behaviour. I have been entirely ignored by everyone.

For so many years, I felt insanely guilty for speaking up about the sexual abuse in our family. I felt so much empathy for my parents and I know how painful this information is. It felt like I was creating the situation rather than simply speaking about it. And yet, despite the fact that I have tried to kill myself multiple times due to incest trauma, and it has affected every area of my life, I receive no empathy from my family. The family has closed ranks. I am the scapegoat. I am the one causing harm. I am the liar. I am delusional. I am “misrepresenting the facts.” They try their best to erase me and carry on as if I don’t exist. And for many years I let them do this.

I can no longer let them do this. Even though it was obvious before that my father is dangerous, I now know that he is currently, actively, perpetrating incest. His is an active threat. And my silence would be complicity. My silence would be allowing him to masturbate in the living room. My silence would put my family members at risk of seeing my father masturbating. While I can’t make my family heed my warnings, I can smash the realm of unreality wide open by refusing to be silent. No Dad. You can’t masturbate in the living room. It’s fucking disgusting and violent and wrong. And I will do everything in my power to stop you. I will do everything in my power to show people who you are. I will make it as difficult as I am able for you to perpetrate incest in our family. I am fucking done.

For a long time I felt like I was hurting my family by telling the truth. I now see that this is the most profound act of love that I could show them. I am receiving all their projections, their rage, and their erasure of me. I am alone screaming the truth, denied love and belonging, attacked with slander, and feeling all the pain that they refuse to feel. And I am doing it because I love them. And the incest has to stop.

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Join us on December 28th at 5pm EST to discuss I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman. The zoom link will be sent out via this substack, or find it at clementinemorrigan.com on the 28th.

Order my new book, Fucking Magic, here.

Order my new book, L’art oublié de baiser, here.

Pre-order my forthcoming book, Love Without Emergency, here.

Clementine Morrigan is an underground writer, cultural change maker, moral philosopher, and brazen truth teller. She is the author of numerous zines and books, including the cult classic zine Love Without Emergency, which will be released as a book with Microcosm Press in 2027. Her popular zine series Fucking Magic was released as a book with Revolutionaries Press in 2025. She co-hosts the podcast Fucking Cancelled with Jay Lesoleil. Her work is known for its unflinching engagement with taboo and difficult topics. She works for a world where the dignity of all beings is recognized and protected.

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It is well known that survivors of sexual violence, and in particular, survivors of child sexual abuse, live with chronic shame as a result of these traumas. While there is a lot written on the impacts of living with chronic shame, there is little written on why these experiences cause shame. It seems as if we’ve all agreed it goes without saying. Of course being raped, or being sexually abused within the family would cause shame. Of course sexual violation would cause shame. Of course the breaking of the incest taboo would cause shame. But why?

It seems we’ve settled for the vague explanation that sexually violent acts are seen as “dirty” (due to their connection to sexuality?) and that the act of being sexually violated therefore contaminates the victim. Or maybe it’s that the helplessness of the victim position is inherently seen as shameful. In the case of incest, because we see incest as disgusting, it makes sense that being a victim of incest would result in shame. All of these explanations are more often alluded to than stated outright. The culture adds to the shame of victims by not taking the question of shame seriously. The culture seems to say — of course it’s shameful. Obviously.

Shame is a complex emotion that seems to serve the evolutionary purpose of signalling when we have behaved in ways that are dangerous or damaging to the collective. Guilt also signals behavioural infractions that should be remedied, but shame indicates behavioural infractions that are so dangerous or damaging they could result in expulsion from the group (the most serious consequence possible for a social primate). Shame is fundamentally tied up with the question of belonging. When we feel shame, we feel fear that we will be rejected from belonging. As social primates, shame is functional insofar as it shows us how to behave in ways that keep the group together and functioning. Shame says you’ve violated a fundamental social code and creates an imperative to return to pro social behaviours.

The chronic shame that results from surviving sexual violence or incest is something different. Chronic shame creates a permanent sense of being outside of the collective. The message of chronic shame is There is something wrong with me. Rather than being a temporary rupture that can be repaired, or warning that can be heeded, chronic shame communicates permanent outsider status. Chronic shame is a permanent feeling of not belonging that seems to stem from an inherent badness, wrongness, or unworthiness.

Sexual violence is annihilation. Sexual violence communicates that your value as an object for sexual use eclipses your value as a human being. Everything fundamental to human dignity: recognition of complex, unique, irreplaceable personhood, protection of vulnerability, the right to privacy especially with regard to the body and sexuality, and the right to bodily autonomy, are exchanged for the pleasure of sexual domination on the part of the perpetrator. Nothing could be more degrading than the message that everything precious and sacred about you matters less than the perpetrator’s sexual desire.

If the collective steps in to prevent or stop the sexual violence, and communicates clearly that the shameful act is the (attempted) perpetration, the victim will probably not develop chronic shame. The collective has the power to prevent chronic shame by countering the degrading message of sexual violence. The collective can say: this is an irreplaceable human being deserving of protection, privacy, and autonomy. The collective can say: it is unacceptable to treat a human being as an object for sexual use. It is wrong. If the collective steps in to rigorously defend and protect the dignity of the victim, chronic shame will probably not develop. The victim will receive a different message: I belong. I matter to the collective. My humanity is worthy of protection and defence. The value of my personhood cannot be reduced to the use value of a sexual object. I am protected. I will not be annihilated. I am seen.

Chronic shame, which communicates a permanent state of badness, wrongness, unworthiness, and outsider status, is the natural reaction to experiences that teach you that your humanity is less valuable than the perpetrator’s sexual pleasure. If the collective fails to counter that message, or worse — strengthens the message by normalizing the violence, demanding submission, or blaming the victim, chronic shame will develop.

In the case of incest, the degrading message of sexual violence is compounded for two reasons. The first is that the victim is a child. Children are supposed to be protected and cherished. Children are supposed to be valued not only as human beings but as children. The vulnerability of children is supposed to be protected, not exploited. The collective is supposed to protect, love, nurture, and cherish the most vulnerable among them — the children. To learn, as a child, that you are more valuable as a sex object than as a child is devastating beyond comprehension.

The second compounding factor is that the sexual abuse is taking place within the family. The family is the place where you are supposed to be safest. The family is the place where you are supposed to be the most loved. The family is the place where your irreplaceable personhood is supposed to be the most cherished, the most valued. We all know that we are much more affected by the news that a loved one is in danger than a stranger. The fact of being a “loved one” is supposed to grant a special status. You are supposed to matter to your family, deeply. The message that you matter more to your family as a sexual object than as a daughter, granddaughter, or sister, is devastating beyond comprehension.

Incest is a family system. It is not a discrete act of perpetration enacted on the victim. I do not believe anyone who says that sexual abuse within the family was “unknown” to the other adults within the family. It is time for us to dispel with the mythology that “they didn’t know.” Incest is carried out with varying degrees of secrecy but it is never actually a secret. Incest is an intergenerational pattern of violence and trauma that relies upon and creates pervasive dissociation within every member of the family. In some families, the sexual abuse is carried out in public, in front of everyone, and multiple adults take part in coercing the children into submission. In these families the sexual violence is not sexual violence — it’s harmless, it’s a “game,” it’s “just the way things are.” In other families, the sexual abuse happens in “secret” and the other adults claim they “didn’t know.” Yet the very obvious signs of child sexual abuse are ignored. Ignorance of child sexual abuse is actually something that must be actively created and maintained. It is extremely obvious when a child is being sexually abused, and adults who do not carry the incest dissociation pattern within themselves will notice and respond. In some families both strategies are present — some types of sexual abuse are carried out publicly and treated as harmless, while others take place in “secret” and everyone pretends not to know.

This situation in which the family — the people who are supposed to love, cherish, and protect the child more than anyone — allow, condone, normalize, and/or ignore the sexual abuse, creates pervasive, chronic shame. The message is clear. The child learns that they do not matter as a person; they are not worthy of protection even from the threat of annihilation; the people they love and trust most in the world expect and demand their submission to the worst possible thing. For a child, facing the terrifying danger of this situation is too much to take. Therefore the child internalizes the idea that the problem is not their abusive family (over which they have no control) but themself. The development of chronic shame starts out as an adaptive strategy: if the problem is me, then maybe I can change it. If the problem is that I am unworthy of love and protection, then maybe I can become worthy.

This betrayal by the other adults in the family is as traumatizing, and sometimes even more traumatizing, than the sexual violence itself. The American Counseling Association notes “in cases in which a mother chooses the abuser over her daughter, the abandonment by the mother may have a greater negative impact on her daughter than did the abuse itself. This rejection not only reinforces the victim’s sense of worthlessness and shame but also suggests to her that she somehow “deserved” the abuse.” The source of chronic shame is not just the sexual abuse itself but the collective agreement that the sexual abuse is acceptable. There is no way for a child to make sense of this level of betrayal other than to internalize it as a pervasive, and chronic, sense of shame.

Years ago, I was watching the show Game of Thrones. While many of the scenes obviously disturbed and upset me, one scene affected me so profoundly that I had to stop watching the show. I had intrusive thoughts about the scene for a long time after watching it and it plunged me into an unbearable and complex emotional experience. The scene in question involved a child being burned alive by her parents as a sacrifice in order to ensure victory in war. The child cries out and pleads with her parents as they, and a crowd of onlookers, watch her be burned alive. There were many extremely disturbing scenes in Game of Thrones, including many that show sexual violence explicitly. I didn’t know, at the time, why this scene in particular affected me so profoundly.

I now realize that this scene perfectly illustrates the emotional experience of incest. Incest families have many strategies for justification, minimization, and denial, but the reality is that in incest families the children are sacrificed. The children are annihilated. The children are made to experience mindbreaking horror while everyone they love and trust look on. The child must be sacrificed for the cohesion of the incest family system. The incest perpetrator demands the child sacrifice and the rest of the family agrees that it is necessary. This experience of being the child sacrifice, of having your personhood offered up in exchange for the perpetrator’s pleasure in sexual domination while everyone you love and trust accepts it as a necessary sacrifice, is the emotional experience of incest and the source of chronic shame.

The result of this trauma for many survivors is a dangerous combination of low self esteem, no capacity to set boundaries, and no sense that you should be treated well. Because you were violated and betrayed in the most profound way possible by the people you trusted most, and this was treated as normal or unimportant, you will have no ability to discern safety from danger. This is why survivors of incest go on to be abused over and over again. This experience of revictimization further entrenches the chronic shame. The world seems to be offering up endless proof that you really are unworthy of love and protection. Additionally, survivors of incest often become addicted to drugs or alcohol, have sex for money, live in poverty, and/or develop chronic illnesses — all shamed experiences. The very evidence of being an incest survivor is considered shameful by society.

Many well meaning people suggest that our response to this situation should be to put the shame “back where it belongs” by assigning it to the perpetrator rather than the victim. This seems to align with the evolutionary function of shame as a deterrent to antisocial behaviours. However, what this strategy misses is the reality that the perpetrators already feel chronic shame. They don’t feel shame for their sexually abusive actions (the chronic dissociation and normalization of sexual violence protects them from this) but they do feel the same chronic shame that they are now creating in their victims. Shame is the emotional heart of incest as a family system. Every perpetrator of incest was introduced to sexual abuse as a child, probably within the family. Whether they were being directly sexually abused themselves, or witnessing sexual abuse within the family, they were indoctrinated into the message of the incest family system: children are to be sacrificed — annihilated — and everyone will accept this. The dissociative strategies necessary to cope with chronic shame feed back into the incest family system. If we want to end incest, we have to end dissociation. If we want to end dissociation, we have to end chronic shame.

This does not mean that we must love or forgive our perpetrators. It does not mean that our perpetrators are not responsible for their actions — they are. Or that the act of sexually abusing a child is not shameful — it is. In fact, the sexual abuse of children, like rape, murder, or cannibalism, is the type of antisocial behaviour that shame probably evolved in our social species to dissuade us from. Rejection from belonging within the collective — the most serious consequence for our social species — is, to some degree, appropriate in situations of child sexual abuse. Adults who have abused children or allowed children to be abused should no longer be allowed access to children. Their adult victims have the right to decide to no longer have relationship with them. The larger collective should have access to information about the abuse in order to ensure the protection of children. Some form of organized separation that prevents access to children is necessary.

However, we cannot simply wash our hands of perpetrators — shame them, incarcerate them, ostracize them, or murder them — and think we have solved the problem. The same problem now exists in their victims. That doesn’t mean that victims will necessarily become perpetrators, but they are at a much higher risk of becoming perpetrators, dissociatively “not seeing” and allowing abuse, and/or being revictimized themselves. Incest is a family system. All perpetrators and enablers were once victims. All victims are at a high risk of perpetuating the system in some form unless they do what they need to do to break the cycle. The problem won’t just go away. We have to face it.

Shaming incest perpetrators (incest survivors) is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It will only increase the dissociation that leads to more incest. We can’t give the shame back because the shame already permeates the entire incest family system. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be honest or expressive in our anger or disgust. That expression is a necessary part of recovery for incest survivors. It doesn’t mean that we must tip toe around the feelings of our abusive families either. We do not need to police our expression in an attempt to protect perpetrators from their own shame. But we do need more effective strategies for ending the cycle of incest. Shame will not cut it. The antidote to the chronic, intergenerational shame and dissociation of incest families is not more chronic shame and dissociation. The antidote to shame is dignity. The antidote to dissociation is truth.

The truth of the incest family system must be spoken out loud, for what it is — not a discrete relationship of perpetration and victimization, but a family system — a pattern of intergenerational violence, dissociation, and shame. A light must be shone on the existence of other examples of incest and sexual abuse in and around the family. Dorothée Dussy, author of Le berceau des dominations, discovered in her research that incest families frequently include an unusually high number of early and violent deaths. These suicides, “accidents,” overdoses, and murders must also be seen, understood, and recognized as part of the incest family system. They are evidence of incest. They are the result of incest. The normalization, minimization, denial, and silencing of incest must be shattered. Incest must be spoken out loud, publicly. All the out of print books on incest must be put back into print. We must interrupt the practice of collective forgetting and repression. Incest must be faced, and seen, in complete detail, for what it is. Not just in each incest family, but in the larger culture that contributes to the dissociation, because the culture is made up of many incest families and non incest families take part by not getting involved and looking away. By minding their own business. We must make the abolition of incest everyone’s business.

The restoration of dignity flows from facing the shattering grief and horror of what has really happened. It is only when we face the lie of chronic shame that we can get underneath it and see the extent of the atrocity. Being good will never solve the problem because the problem is not that I am bad. We must face the lie of chronic shame, the adaptive strategy of an abused child, and realize that the problem was never our fundamental unworthiness, badness, unlovability, but that we were children held captive in an incest family system, where all of the adults were dissociating and reenacting a pattern of intergenerational violence, trauma, and chronic shame. We must restore our dignity by grieving that it wasn’t protected, and by facing the truth that we were violated and betrayed in the worst way possible by the people we loved and trusted the most. Dignity is restored when we see the irreplaceable singularity of every human being, including ourselves. Dignity is restored when we see the enormous pain of every abused child and we commit ourselves to creating a world where this never happens again.

Part of this work is honouring the dignity of survivors. What I mean by that is that survivors need not only to have our dignity as human beings restored, but we must now carry a new kind of dignity — the dignity of survivors. Honouring the dignity of survivors means recognizing and meeting the specific needs that survivors have. It means developing cultural literacy around survivors. It means not assuming someone had a loving family because many people did not. It means not assuming that someone’s introduction to sexuality was positive or benign because for many people it was not. It means normalizing that incest survivors may have different needs around our boundaries, our social interactions, our sexual and romantic relationships, and our community involvement. It means making it socially acceptable to talk about those needs and why we have them. Honouring the dignity of survivors also means welcoming and valuing the specific gifts and knowledge that survivors carry. Survivors who have faced our trauma are deeply wise and hold profound lessons for humanity. Rather than being pitied or shamed for what was done to us, we should be honoured, respected, and listened to for the work we had to do in order to break the cycle.

Finally, no piece of writing on child sacrifice and chronic shame can be complete without mentioning the children of Palestine and the horrors being inflicted upon them in front of the eyes of the world. Racism, like sexual violence, is annihilation. Everything fundamental to human dignity: recognition of complex, unique, irreplaceable personhood, protection of vulnerability, the right to privacy especially with regard to the body and sexuality, and the right to bodily autonomy, are exchanged for the pleasure of (often sexualized) domination on the part of the perpetrator. Even children are stripped of their inherent right to protection and dignity in the face of racism. It is no surprise to me that Israel, a genocidal and racist state built on the displacement, dehumanization, and mass murder of Palestinians, relies on sexual violence and the most extreme forms of violence against children imaginable to carry out its genocidal aims. Israel, much like an incest family system, runs on intergenerational trauma and mass collective dissociation. We, the collective, must intervene. We, the collective, must insist, with all the force possible, that Palestinians are human beings who do not deserve to be tortured and murdered. We, the collective, must insist, with all the force possible, that Palestinian children are children and they must be cherished, protected, and loved, not violently sacrificed in the name of genocidal domination. Our responsibility toward the Palestinians begins with stopping the genocide but it does not end there. Through a similar process to what I described above, we must interrupt the development of chronic shame that results from being subjected to such violence in the face of so many witnesses, by intervening, by telling the truth, and by redignifying all survivors of genocide, imperialism, and racism. Racism must be abolished.

Chronic shame has debilitating health effects, creates chronic inflammation in the body, creates chronic illness, and shortens lifespan. Chronic shame results in a whole range of behaviours and survival strategies that increase the risk of revictimization, perpetration, and dissociative inability to appropriately intervene on violence. Chronic shame is a public health issue. Incest is not the only system that creates chronic shame but chronic shame is the heart of the incest family system. We must make incest something that can be spoken, publicly. We must not shy away from this topic because it makes us uncomfortable. We have an ethical, moral, and political responsibility to end the systematic silencing of incest survivors and public discussions of incest. We have an ethical, moral, and political responsibility to take up the abolition of incest as a collective cause. Together we must insist: Not one more child will be sacrificed.

Manage Your Subscription

Join us on December 28th at 5pm EST to discuss I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman. The zoom link will be sent out via this substack, or find it at clementinemorrigan.com on the 28th.

Order my new book, Fucking Magic, here.

Order my new book, L’art oublié de baiser, here.

Pre-order my forthcoming book, Love Without Emergency, here.

Clementine Morrigan is an underground writer, cultural change maker, moral philosopher, and brazen truth teller. She is the author of numerous zines and books, including the cult classic zine Love Without Emergency, which will be released as a book with Microcosm Press in 2027. Her popular zine series Fucking Magic was released as a book with Revolutionaries Press in 2025. She co-hosts the podcast Fucking Cancelled with Jay Lesoleil. Her work is known for its unflinching engagement with taboo and difficult topics. She works for a world where the dignity of all beings is recognized and protected.

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Many incest survivors find ourselves caught up in a practice of ritualized vomiting. Alcoholism and bulimia are two common practices in the incest survivor playbook. These both include a lot of vomiting, but the vomiting is seen as secondary, not the point of the behaviour. We might ask ourselves — why am I drinking? Or — what is causing my eating disorder? We are less likely to ask — does all this vomiting serve a purpose of some kind?

When I was drinking I spent countless hours on the bathroom floor, shaking and sweating and retching. What I considered a normal hangover was definitely alcohol poisoning. Drinking always came with its suffering, a price to be paid. Part of that was the hard work of my body trying to get the poison up. My body rejecting and expelling, saying no. I went through that ritual over and over again, countless times. The visceral and somatic expression of disgust, revulsion, rejection of the poison. These hangovers were a ritualized enactment of the repressed emotional experience of incest.

Incest is disgusting. Sexual invasion by a family member is the most disgusting thing imaginable. On top of this, my grandfather was particularly disgusting. Not only was he mindbreakingly terrifying, he was physically repulsive. He was always almost naked, wearing a tiny pair of underwear and nothing else. He never washed his face and his face was therefore always covered in food and slick with grease which I would feel when he forcibly rubbed our faces together. And then there was his mouth, the centre of disgust, the site of the invasion. His dentures were always full of food, his tongue like a worm, all over my face, licking, probing, searching, entering, his wet mouth and dirty filthy face. His arms impossibly strong.

I was trained to override my natural disgust, my natural revulsion and rejection. I was forced to repress it if I wanted access to love. Over and over again I was punished and shamed by my father for showing disgust and fear towards my grandfather. Over and over I learned that if I wanted to be loved, I had to swallow my disgust and learn to take it. My father trained me in other ways: I was forced to eat bread green with mold. I was trained to accept dog shit all over the floor in the basement in varying degrees of aging, as if it were normal. My natural disgust response was literally trained out of me. In my alcoholic rituals, I viscerally lived that revulsion by puking my guts out over and over again.

Before taking ayahuasca, I did a vomitivo ritual with lemongrass. Me and twenty other people took turns chugging lemongrass until we puked. Here again was my vomiting ritual but in a much more controlled and intentional container. Then again, in the ayahuasca, there is so much vomiting. My sacred puke bucket cradled between my legs as I literally vomit the incest out of my body. I feel it. The deepest disgust. The complete and total rejection. My body expelling the poison, all the energetic imprints of my incestuous family and their dissociative worldview. In the medicine, for the first time, I finally see things clearly, for what they are. I am, in a ritual of vomiting, severing myself from my family line. I am not healing all of them inside my body. No. I am rejecting them from my body entirely, expelling them, giving them up. The air crackles green and blue and yellow with song as my body, the living animal, says no, and rejects it.

There is a turn happening right now within somatic trauma healing world, suggesting that there has been too big a focus on big releases and that big releases can be retraumatizing. This turn is suggesting that, especially for women, a more gentle approach is preferable. I’m sure this critique is an important counterbalance to too much reliance on the idea of big releases, and that it is bringing something necessary about the slow and long pace of recovery. But I want to add a disclaimer that for me and for many survivors — incest is a trauma that needs a big release. And one part of the big release that needs to happen is a visceral expression of disgust. This is part of why I think ayahuasca is very powerful medicine for incest survivors. We get to puke our guts out, not compulsively and unconsciously, but in a truly intentional, ritualized way, in which we can connect directly to the poison we are trying to expel and expel it through the act of vomiting.

Disgust is such an important emotion. If disgust has been trained out of you, your defences are not functioning properly. Intentionally connecting to disgust and expressing the stored disgust in your body can be good for you. Vomiting isn’t the only way to do this work. But I think it’s time we approach the ritiualized vomiting practices of incest survivors with more compassion and curiosity, finding ways to work with these intelligent responses in the body, rather than try to repress them.

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November Events Online and in Montreal

November 13 (tomorrow), 6:30 pm, Montreal: book launch for Fucking Magic and L’art oublié de baiser at N’était-ce pas l’été (6792 St-Laurent) featuring Miranda Schreiber and Mélissa Thériault. Plus get my zines for 50% off.

November 15 & 16, 11:30 am to 7pm, Montreal: I’m tabling Expozine all day, both days. I’m also having a huge sale on zines and books. Most titles will be 50% off. Bring cash!

November 22, 12pm EST, online: Is psychiatry obsolete? Join Kelsey Zazanis and Clementine Morrigan for a virtual conversation and Q&A on psychiatric abolition, divesting from the DSM, and building futures beyond pathologization. Together we will unpack the hidden history of psychiatry and its role in the repression and reproduction of incest, sexual abuse, and other social violences. This event will be recorded and the recording will be sent to everyone who got a ticket. Tickets here.

November 23, 1pm, Montreal: talk with Jordan Coulombe of Crooked Fagazine at Espace Zines at Salon du Livre in Montreal.

November 30, 5pm EST, online: I was human after all online book club discussing How to Be Unmothered, with special guest appearance of the author, Camille U. Adams. The only thing you have to do to take part is be a paid subscriber to this substack and read the book. I will send/post the link here a little before the meeting starts. You’ll get to meet the author! So cool.

Other Announcements

I started a 2002 online diary inspired “secret” substack for real fans only. Check it out.

“In the late 90s and early 2000s, when the internet was strange and anonymous, my writing flourished in online diaries. Real ones remember. My writing practice craves a public facing secret diary, with a smaller audience and a little more privacy. With an audience who really wants to be here and is unafraid of being spammed by the exploratory creative practice of Clementine Morrigan.

This is the b-sides, or the close friends story. It’s not for everyone. Feel no obligation to subscribe. The price is double than a subscription to my main substack and the writing there is better. This is the weird stuff, the stuff I’m trying and exploring. And full disclosure it will be literally whatever I want it to be, with no schedule, no structure, no expectations. Just a space for semi-public writing, like back in the day.”

Also, my episode of Ti leggiamo una femminista came out — “Figlie Mostruose” con Clementine Morrigan.

I don’t remember my father’s rage

On traumatic memory and amnesia

I have always found the idea of recovering memories strange — trying to imagine the imposition of a past that a moment ago did not exist. Like a lot of survivors I wondered if there was more that I couldn’t remember. The truth is that there is a lot of my childhood that I simply do not remember. I remember the broad strokes and there are key specific moments that I remember. But the rest of it is a fog. And even the stuff I remember, it’s like I remembered to remember it. Like in the haze of all that forgetting I did something special to hold onto these memories even as everything around them disappeared and much of their details were hollowed out.

It’s funny — I remember the bathing suit I was wearing when my grandfather forced his tongue into my mouth. It was yellow with a pattern of white flowers. It was wet because I had just come back from the lake where my little sister and grandmother were on the pedalboat which was filling with water. I swam back and sent my dad after them in the canoe. I remember the yellow bathing suit. I remember his words Give us a kiss. I remember my thoughts: be respectful, go to him, like dad says. I remember the desperate need to repress my disgust, my desire to fight or run, my certainty of danger. I remember that the motivating factor in overcoming my inner defence system and submitting to an incestuous pedophile was a desire to be good in my father’s eyes. I remember that I was brainwashed, that I was trained. I remember the strength of my grandfather’s arms, the force of his tongue, his greasy stubble, the feeling of him entering my mouth, the panic, ears ringing, the lucidity in his eyes when he said: Come back here. I won’t do that again.

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I received an email from the event organizers stating “The team at L’Eugélionne bookstore has shared with us their discomfort in welcoming you, due to past behavior perceived as unsupportive toward survivors of sexual violence” and disinviting me from participating in the event. L’Eugélionne has never communicated with me directly about this, clarified what their accusations against me actually are, or let me know that I am blacklisted from taking part in literary events at the store.

I am a survivor of incestuous child sexual abuse, a huge amount of physical and sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and rape. I have complex ptsd and this has shaped the entire course of my life. The majority of my writing and my career is about being a survivor and supporting survivors. I am one of the most outspoken voices doing work on the topic of incest in the English speaking world. My mother threatened to sue me for writing about the sexual abuse in my family. I receive letters from survivors almost daily about how important my work is to them in facing and transforming their trauma.

To say that I am “unsupportive toward survivors of sexual violence” is slander. To blacklist me from community events based on extremely vague and unspecific accusations, without any direct communication, or the possibility of me expressing my position, is literally silencing survivors. Not only is it silencing me, but it is silencing the many survivors who find my work life saving.

While I don’t know what exactly is meant by “past behavior perceived as unsupportive toward survivors of sexual violence,” I assume this is referring to my opposition to cancel culture. I oppose cancel culture precisely because I am a survivor. I take issue with punishment as a strategy for ending violence because I know it is not effective. My ex partner who put my body through a wall and raped me, who himself was a survivor of severe child abuse, killed himself in jail. None of this is abstract or theoretical to me. My refusal of punishment as a strategy is because I know it doesn’t work. I am not content with punishing perpetrators. I want to end the cycle of violence for good. I also take huge issue with people mischaracterizing interpersonal conflicts, political disagreements, or mismatched needs in a relationship as abuse. Not only does this make identifying abuse far more confusing and difficult (especially for those of us who have complex ptsd and can therefore have huge nervous system reactions to non-abusive situations) but it literally steals from survivors. It takes our trauma and turns it into a costume and shield that people can use to justify their own abusive behaviours towards members of their community who they have conflict with or simply don’t like.

I understand that there are people who politically disagree with this stance and they are free to do so. But to frame this stance as “unsupportive of survivors” is literally lying. To blacklist me and prevent survivors from accessing my work in community spaces is anti-survivor. Survivors, like all groups, are allowed to have internal political disagreements. There are tens of thousands of survivors who agree with my political position on the subject of cancel culture. Whether L’Eugélionne agrees with me or not, they do not have the right to slander me, and they should not decide for other survivors whether my leftist, pro-survivor, anti-violence ideas should be considered.

L’Eugélionne does not reply to any emails I send them. I am going to write to them again, requesting dialogue on this subject, and requesting that they take responsibility for slandering me with vague and baseless accusations, for ostracizing me from the tiny Anglo literary community in Montreal (which I rightfully belong to as a internationally celebrated English language writer in this city), and for speaking over the many survivors who find my work indispensable.

I am asking my readers, if you find this unacceptable, to write to L’Eugélionne and tell them why. In particular if you are a survivor who feels supported by my work, I would love for you to express that to them. There are so few writers in the English speaking world doing work on incest. My work is life saving and important. I deserve to take part in literary events in my city. At the very least, they owe me a direct conversation.

Here are the two emails you can write to:

info@librairieleuguelionne.com

evenements@librairieleuguelionne.com

Thank you for your support.

Clementine

You can still come to my book launch at another store which does not take part in blacklisting me! Please come out, your support is deeply appreciated in this hostile climate. Thursday November 13th, 6:30pm at N’était-ce pas l’été. Free admission, books and zines for sale. I will be joined by Mélissa Thériault of Sans Blague! and Miranda Schrieber of Iris and the Dead.

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“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.” — Jacqueline Harpman, I who have never known men

One of the most important things we can be doing right now is reading. That may seem strange and counterintuitive in this time of endless catastrophe and emergency. Reading is certainly not all we need to be doing right now, but I believe it is a necessity. Our literacy, critical thinking skills, empathy, attention spans, and imaginations are being deeply eroded by algorithmic late stage capitalism. Now more than ever we need to be honing the skills that reading nurtures in us: deep, complex thought, wild imagination, thinking across difference, cultivating empathy, and paying close attention.

My reading practice has developed profoundly over the last year. I have surpassed my reading goal of 52 books this year. I have read 55 books and it’s not yet November. I am reading voraciously and I am on social media significantly less. I am reading so many incredible and important books. I want to share these books with others and feel the thrill of collective discussion of these important texts. And I want to encourage the development of your reading practice.

To further these goals, I am starting a book club, titled I was human after all. The books will be selected from my reading list, which is largely fiction and narrative nonfiction. The titles will include speculative fiction, magical realism, sci fi, and other weird fiction, as well as memoirs, especially experimental and weird memoirs. We will read one book a month, and meet on the last Sunday of the month over zoom to discuss the book (5pm EST). The book club meeting will be open to anyone who is a paying subscriber that month. You will receive the link to the zoom meeting via email or the substack app (however you subscribe) a little before the meeting starts. Or check clementinemorrigan.com for the link.

The book for November will be:

How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir by Camille U. Adams

You can order the book here or through your local indie bookstore. Please avoid buying from Amazon if at all possible.

The meeting to discuss will be:

November 30th 2025

5pm to 6:30pm EST

The link to the meeting will be sent out and posted at clementinemorrigan.com shortly before the meeting starts. See you then!

I am having a double book launch in Montreal! Please share with all your Montreal contacts and come out! Thursday November 13th, 6:30pm at N’était-ce pas l’été. Free admission, books and zines for sale. I will be joined by Mélissa Thériault of Sans Blague! and Miranda Schrieber of Iris and the Dead.

My zines on trauma informed polyamory are being turned into a book which will be out with Microcosm Publishing in January 2027. The preorder is open! Preordering helps the overall success of the book.

“When we’ve been hurt in our past, relationships can feel fraught, and polyamorous ones even more so. Firebrand author Clementine Morrigan is no stranger to the intense emotions and nervous system reactions non-monogamy can inspire, especially in those of us with insecure attachment styles and significant trauma histories. With directness, vulnerability, and warmth, she shows us how to embrace the parts of ourselves that have acted out, while learning new strategies for our relationships going forward.

Morrigan provides empathy, a new framework and a set of tools, and the achievable goal of building a sense of safety so that our multi-faceted love life no longer overwhelms us. She invites us to validate our experience, set aside our shame, and find a path through the pain toward the fulfilling, secure relationships our hearts desire.” Preorder here!

Have you ordered F*cking Magic yet? Have you called your local bookstore and asked them to carry it? If you want incest survivor, bisexual-queer, psychiatric survivor, crazy magic writing to make it into the hands of as many people as possible, your support goes a long way! Published in a beautiful new edition with Revolutionaries press, F*cking Magic is more than 400 pages long and my favourite thing I’ve ever written.

“F*cking Magic is a collection of 12 zines originally hand-made by Clementine Morrigan and posted throughout the world. From alcoholism to sobriety, surviving incest to BDSM, throughout the seasons and many iterations of becoming, Morrigan leans into the darkest and most vulnerable parts of her life in this cult coming-of-age memoir that speaks to taboos and universal truths.” You can order it here.

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Have you ordered F*cking Magic yet? Have you called your local bookstore and asked them to carry it? If you want incest survivor, bisexual-queer, psychiatric survivor, crazy magic writing to make it into the hands of as many people as possible, your support goes a long way! Published in a beautiful new edition with Revolutionaries press, F*cking Magic is more than 400 pages long and my favourite thing I’ve ever written.

“F*cking Magic is a collection of 12 zines originally hand-made by Clementine Morrigan and posted throughout the world. From alcoholism to sobriety, surviving incest to BDSM, throughout the seasons and many iterations of becoming, Morrigan leans into the darkest and most vulnerable parts of her life in this cult coming-of-age memoir that speaks to taboos and universal truths.” You can order it here.

My zines on trauma informed polyamory are being turned into a book which will be out with Microcosm Publishing in January 2027. The preorder is open! Preordering helps the overall success of the book.

“When we’ve been hurt in our past, relationships can feel fraught, and polyamorous ones even more so. Firebrand author Clementine Morrigan is no stranger to the intense emotions and nervous system reactions non-monogamy can inspire, especially in those of us with insecure attachment styles and significant trauma histories. With directness, vulnerability, and warmth, she shows us how to embrace the parts of ourselves that have acted out, while learning new strategies for our relationships going forward.

Morrigan provides empathy, a new framework and a set of tools, and the achievable goal of building a sense of safety so that our multi-faceted love life no longer overwhelms us. She invites us to validate our experience, set aside our shame, and find a path through the pain toward the fulfilling, secure relationships our hearts desire.” Preorder here!

For those who don’t know, I am writing a book called The ontology of pussy. In the simplest terms, it is my squirting memoir. In more complete terms, it is a trauma and chronic illness memoir that offers something other than pain and grief. It is a memoir about surviving incest, domestic violence, and rape, and developing lichen sclerorsus (an inflammatory autoimmune disorder of the vulva). It is also a memoir about co-creating deep, profound life-changing romantic love, and extremely hot, paradigm-shifting sex. It is about late 30s sexual awakening and the power of women’s sexuality when we step outside of the object role. It is about the freedom, sovereignty, boundaries, and limits that make real, transformative surrender possible. It’s about vulnerability and strength, polyamory, part time heterosexuality, and PUSSY. It is more “autofiction” than my other work, and I hope to slide into magical realism, but we will see.

I have been talking about this book for awhile, but I have also felt very stalled on it. I am finally starting to feel some momentum with the project. While most of the book will not see the light of day until publication, I am going to share some excerpts of the work in progress with my paid subscribers, as a way to keep motivated about the project, and as a way to keep this substack juicy while I’m turning a lot of my attention to the book. Here is a little excerpt. I am very excited about this project. Thank you for supporting my dream of writing more books and developing my practice as a writer.

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The way this case has been taken up by the media is through the primary emotion of shock. The violence is shocking and it is especially shocking that such extreme violence was carried out for so long, and involved so many perpetrators, without detection. Caroline Darian, the daughter of the Pelicots, has become an activist, raising awareness of the practice of chemical submission, and how to notice signs that you may be being drugged without your knowledge and awareness. Chemical submission is terrifying precisely because it can be so covert. Unlike other forms of sexual assault, it can happen completely outside of the victim’s awareness. Darian and other activists raising awareness about chemical submission urge women having unexplained symptoms of confusion and memory loss and/or unexplained vaginal trauma to ask for toxicology screening from their doctors. This is incredibly important work because chemical submission remains largely unknown and we have no idea how frequently this type of sexual violence is carried out.

What I want to draw attention to here, is the narrative that Dominique Pelicot was a perfectly normal family man and that there was absolutely no indication that he was capable of anything like this. Part of the reason this case is seen is as so shocking is because of how such extreme and extensive violence was able to remain hidden for so long. Raising awareness about the signs of chemical submission is an important part of noticing and intervening on this type of violence. I want to suggest, however, that there were other signs that we can also learn to notice and identify. This is not, in any way, to put any blame or responsibility on the victims, but to encourage a cultural reckoning with patterns of violence so we can better notice and intervene. The case of Dominique Pelicot is not only a case of chemical submission and mass rape; it is also a case of incest. The incest element of Pelicot’s violence has been largely suppressed and not reported on, which prevents us from understanding the violence and situating it within what we already know about incest and how it works. As with chemical submission, incest leaves clues, and we, culturally, have a responsibility to be able to identify these clues.

Before going further, I want to emphasize that I am writing about violence that did not happen to me, and I want to do so with humility and respect. This is not my story. I encourage everyone reading this to read Caroline Darian’s book, translated to English as I’ll never call him dad again. Caroline Darian has told her own story about the violence she, her mother, and other members of her family have experienced, and you should prioritize reading her own words about what happened to her. You should also look into the important advocacy work she is doing on chemical submission.

After Caroline Darian and her brothers went into the police station to learn about the unbelievable violence their father had been covertly carrying out against their mother for years, Darian was called back to the police station for another meeting. She was shown two photos of herself taken some time when she was in her 30s, found on her father’s computer, where she appears to be sleeping on her side in her underwear. The underwear she is wearing in the photos is not her own. The position she is in is not one she sleeps in. She is a very light sleeper and in the photos the lights are on, something she is unable to sleep through. Her father took and saved the photos. It is very obvious that Dominique Pelicot drugged, undressed, dressed, posed, and photographed his daughter. This, already, is sexual assault and incest. Knowing what Pelicot did to his wife, it is clear that he probably also raped his daughter and could have allowed other men to rape her as well.

Darian became an official victim in the case but the violence against her was noted as an afterthought. Because there was such extensive evidence of the mass rapes of her mother, and no photographs or videos of Darian being assaulted, the focus of the case remained on Gisèle Pelicot. Darian was left with the question of “if” she was assaulted by her father. I want to point out that even questioning whether she was assaulted by her father follows the pattern of incest in which what actually “counts” as incest is forever receding into the horizon. Culturally, we always wait for more evidence, for some future line to be crossed, before we can assert that incest has really happened. Yet that line we are waiting to be crossed is always moving further away. Incest is not seen as real until we know for sure that genital assault has taken place (and even then we can continue to argue, debate, and doubt it). Drugging, undressing, dressing, and posing your daughter is itself an extremely violent, incestuous sexual assault. Secondly, it is extremely obvious that Pelicot did more than that, even if we don’t have photographic evidence of it. Of course a man who did what he did to Gisèle Pelicot did the same to his daughter who he drugged and posed. In I’ll never call him dad again Darian writes that she had unexplained vaginal tearing in her 30s which required surgery. It is obvious that Darian was raped by her father and yet this continues to be treated as an unknown. This follows the pattern of incest.

Heartbreakingly, Gisèle Pelicot’s reaction to the discovery that her daughter was also a victim also follows the pattern of incest. She said to her daughter “Your father is incapable of such a thing. I just can’t believe it… Because if I could, it would destroy me utterly.” Incest is a family system. It is not a discrete relationship of perpetration and victimization that plays out only between the incestuous father and his daughter. It is a pattern of intergenerational trauma that impacts every member of the family. All the adults in an incest family play a role in perpetrating the dynamic, even if they are also being victimized. All the children in an incest family are victims, even if they aren’t the ones being directly sexually abused. In patriarchal incest families the father (and sometimes also the grandfather) believes he has a right to sexual access to all the women and girls in the family, including his partner, his daughters, his granddaughters, his nieces, and even the partners of his sons. This belief in his right to sexual access can be extremely overt or extremely covert (or anywhere in between) but there are always signs that we can learn to identify. Incest does not need to include physical sexual assault. It can be carried out in many ways, including sexual comments, leering, voyeurism, invasion of privacy, and boundary violations of various kinds. The dissociation and denial that is necessary for incest to be carried out exists in all members of the family, including direct victims, indirect victims (the other children who witness the abuse), and enablers. It is a very common incest pattern for the wives/mothers in patriarchal incest families to insist that the father is not capable of incest, no matter how much evidence there is that he is in fact capable of it. This denial is a fundamental part of how incest functions.

The incest that I experienced in my family is dismissed because the sexual assaults my grandfather committed against me and the other children (licking our faces, simulated making out, forced kissing, mouth penetration with his tongue), as well as his constant sexual comments and threats, were seen as “normal” and “harmless.” I always assumed that the extreme denial in my family was a result of the “minor” nature of the sexual violence I experienced. In fact, this denial is a feature in all incest families, no matter how severe the violence is. My mother openly admits that all the men in my father’s family “played” these types of sexual “games” with the children, and that this behaviour was totally normalized. Then, in the next breath, she attacks me and calls me delusional when I report that my father was showing clear signs of considering molesting my sister. She insists that my father is not capable of that, even though she just said that incest and sexual abuse were completely normalized and acceptable in my father’s family, and he has done nothing to face or break free from those patterns.

In the case of Dominique Pelicot the insistence that he is not capable of sexually assaulting his daughter is glaring. A man who drugged and raped his wife for over a decade is clearly capable of anything. The fact that he drugged and posed his daughter makes it clear without a doubt that he is capable of incest because drugging and posing your daughter is incest. Seeing the exact pattern of denial in the Pelicot case as in my own family shows me that the denial in my family has nothing to do with the sexual abuse being “minor.” It clearly does not matter how extreme the sexual abuse is. It is a pattern of incest that we insist that perpetrators of incest are not capable of perpetrating incest.

I also want to point out that the second part of Gisèle Pelicot’s response to her daughter’s victimization also follows a common pattern in families of patriarchal incest. She said “I just can’t believe it… Because if I could, it would destroy me utterly.” I have spoken to countless survivors of patriarchal incest whose mothers dismissed and/or repressed their daughter’s speech about the incest by focusing on their own emotional experience. So many mothers in patriarchal incest families respond by defending that they were “good mothers,” by becoming extremely emotional and overwhelmed, and/or by covertly or overtly demanding that their child step into the parental role and take care of their feelings rather than being the parent themself and taking care of their sexually abused child. Because Gisèle Pelicot is the victim of such extreme violence, I think many would be uncomfortable pointing out that she is actively taking part in patterns of patriarchal incest by focusing on her own feelings, denying her daughter’s experience of violence, and trying to repress her daughter’s speech. Yet this is exactly what she is doing. Darian writes that her mother said to her “You’re forgetting that he wasn’t always the devil incarnate. He did so much for you. For your brothers too. I was happy with him by my side. I loved him so much. I want to remember the good times.” It is extremely revealing to see these standard incest patterns of minimization, repression, and denial carried out in a case as extreme as the Pelicots.

Many wives/mothers in patriarchal incest families are themselves being victimized. This does not prevent or negate the reality that many of them also take part in the incest dynamic by encouraging or demanding denial and dissociation. We need to be able to hold both truths at once. Incest is a cycle that repeats over generations. Perpetrators and enablers of incest were once victims of incest. The perpetrator, enabler, and victim roles are not mutually exclusive. In I’ll never call him dad again Darian writes “I know that my mother has been through worse than me….” I think the assumption that Gisèle Perlicot is the primary victim and “has been through worse” because she was assaulted so many times by so many men is actually false. I don’t think sexual trauma can be weighed only by how often one was assaulted. I don’t see the point in comparing trauma and deciding who had it “worse” but I will say that being sexually assaulted by your father is traumatic in a different way than being sexually assaulted by your husband. There is actually nothing more traumatic than being drugged and sexually assaulted by your own father.

The way that the revelation that Darian was also drugged and assaulted was responded to follows the patterns of incest, but the patterns of incest were visible within the Pelicot family long before Pelicot’s devices were seized by the police. It is important that these patterns of incest are named explicitly. We live in a culture that practices widespread denial and dissociation about incest. We all know families where incest is taking place and we are all trained to brush the obvious signs under the rug. Not all incest families include chemical submission and mass rape, but all incest families produce and perpetuate the cycle of incest and intergenerational trauma. If we become skilled at noticing and intervening on these signs we will be able to put an end to a huge amount of violence, including extreme cases like the Pelicots but also the more mundane and normalized (but also severely traumatic) forms of incest that exist all around us.

Despite the repeated representations of Dominique Pelicot as a normal family man who no one could ever suspect of such violence, Caroline Darian writes in I’ll never call him dad again that she witnessed domestic violence by the time she was nine. She writes “My father grabbed the collar of my mother’s blouse, hauling her off her feet and slamming her against the bathroom wall.” Domestic violence against the wife/mother is a red flag for abuse of children and sexual abuse within the family, as these are all interrelated aspects of patriarchal domestic violence and misogyny. The existence of physical abuse within the family does not necessarily indicate incest, but it should be considered a risk factor.

In another section, Darian writes “[As a child], I discovered that my father had been secretly taking money from the kitty I’d saved up while working summer jobs. He was shameless when I confronted him, telling me that he was within his rights and that he’d pay me back soon enough. When I looked at the other families around us, I realized that ours was somehow upside down, that it wasn’t normal I had to play the parent to my father.” This is abusive behaviour, and the entitled and proprietary way he justifies stealing from his daughter indicates that he feels his daughter and her belongings are actually his. The parent/child role reversal in which the children are expected to parent the adults is also a common pattern in incest families.

In the early 2000s, Dominique Pelicot sexually propositioned Gisèle Pelicot’s close friend and godmother to one of their sons. The friend told Gisèle “You have no idea who you are living with. You’ve got to open your eyes. Your husband isn’t the man you’ve always taken him to be.” Gisèle Pelicot responded with anger and denial, ending the friendship. Dominique Pelicot denied the accusation and even threatened to “beat up” the friend for the accusation. While this, on its own, doesn’t indicate incest, it does indicate patriarchy, misogyny, and sexually invasive behaviour. Sexually propositioning your wife’s close friend fits within the pattern of patriarchal incest in which all the women of the household are thought to be sexually available to the patriarch, in this case including friends who frequent the household. Threatening to beat a woman up is a huge red flag for domestic violence. Dominique Pelicot also insisted that the friendship breakup was final, which indicates controlling and isolating behaviours toward his wife.

In 2011, Florian, one of the sons of Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot, and his girlfriend, were living with the Pelicots. Darian writes “One day [Florian’s] girlfriend walked in on my father masturbating behind his computer in his office. He’d left the door wide open.” This is incest. Knowingly leaving the door open and masturbating is intentionally sexually invasive behaviour. This kind of incestuous behaviour is extremely common and easily brushed under the rug as an embarrassing mistake. In fact, non-abusive adults are very capable of ensuring that they have privacy when masturbating. This is intentionally boundary violating sexual behaviour carried out within the family. It is incest. If this happens within a family, everyone should be aware that incest is occurring and that other forms of incest have probably happened or will happen. Adults who do this kind of thing should definitely not be allowed around children. When Gisèle Pelicot was made aware that this happened, she spoke to her husband about it and he responded with “violent indignation.” Both the patriarchal father’s angry defence of his sexually abusive behaviour, and the wife’s willingness to let this situation go are patterns of patriarchal incest.

Dorothée Dussy, a French anthropologist who studies incest has written that “incest occurs in a context where it exists already.” One of the greatest risk factors for incest in a family is whether there is already a history of incest within that family, and if so, whether the family members have had help facing and transforming the inherited patterns of incest. Amélie Charruault discussing Dorothée Dussy’s Le berceau des dominations: Anthropologie de l’inceste writes “In retracing the family histories of the prisoners interviewed, Dussy reveals that “incest occurs in a context where it exists already”. The majority of the 22 men interviewed in prison reported being aware of other incestuous situations in their family. Though they refuse to think that they acted in a way that imitated their past, seven men also reported having been sexually abused in childhood.”

Denis Pelicot, the father of Dominique Pelicot, was an abusive misogynist. Darian writes that “he had nothing but contempt for women and seized every opportunity to put them down.” She writes “When I was ten, [my grandfather] made a cutting remark about my knees, saying they were ugly. His words upset me, but it was the way he looked at them that made me queasy.” As a child, she noticed the incestuous way her grandfather looked at and spoke about her body. Darian then goes on to explain that Denis Pelicot replaced his wife with his foster daughter after his wife’s death. Dominique Pelicot’s father took a young woman who he had raised since childhood as his sexual and romantic partner. Dominique Pelicot was raised in a family of patriarchal incest. Not only that, but Darian explains that, as a child, her parents sent her to stay with her grandfather and his daughter-wife for weeks with no other adult supervision. This is incest. This shows clearly that the Pelicots are a patriarchal incest family, with all the standard dissociation and denial of patriarchal incest families, including the enabling of the wife/mother. While Gisèle Pelicot describes herself as having had a happy childhood, I am certain that she experienced some form of incest in her childhood. It is only the established patterns of dissociation and denial in incest families that would allow a mother to send her daughter off to a man who took his own daughter as a wife. Incest occurs in a context where it exists already.

When Dominique Pelicot was initially apprehended by the police for filming “up skirts” he told his wife that two women had complained about him to the police. He broke down crying and said he had done “something really stupid.” While he didn’t say explicitly what he was apprehended for, even one woman making a complaint to the police about your husband should raise red flags. Gisèle Pelicot “who feared he was about to say he had some terrible illness, was almost relieved by the tale.” Her reaction to the initial police involvement — seeing it as something minor — fits with the overall pattern of her downplaying and making excuses for her husband’s abusive behaviours, against herself and other women. While she had no idea the extent of his violence, her dissociation and denial fits the pattern of incest.

Later on in the investigation, the police discovered that Dominique Pelicot had installed hidden cameras in his home and had captured images of his daughter and his two daughters-in-law naked. This again reveals that the Pelicot case is a case of patriarchal incest in which the patriarch believes he has the right to sexual access to all the women in the family. The police also discovered that he had paired naked images of his daughter with naked images of his wife, making degrading commentary and comparing their bodies in a variety of poses. Another police discovery revealed that he raped his unconscious wife in his daughter’s home while his daughter was on vacation. The eroticization of boundary violations within the family is a hallmark of incest. Not only was he raping his wife but he was doing it in his daughter’s home in order to also violate his daughter. It could not be more clear that this is a case of incest.

We think of incest as interchangeable with child sexual abuse but this is not exactly accurate. Incest usually includes child sexual abuse but it is not limited to it. In incest families where child sexual abuse does occur the abuse can continue into the children’s adulthood. It is also possible for incest to increase or begin as the children reach adolescence or adulthood. Patriarchal incest is about sexual entitlement to all the women in the family; it may or may not coincide with the overt sexual abuse of children. At the same time, there are reasons to suspect that Dominique Pelicot was a risk to children, and all children he had access to should be interviewed to look for signs of abuse. Discussing a case file in which Dominique Pelicot’s online communications were documented, Darian writes “The lawyer draws our attention to a exchange with a man who is proposing to offer up his wife for rape. Talking about what to do if any children happen to be present in the house at the time, my father says “just give them a jab with their dinner.”” Here Pelicot admits that he has no issues with drugging children. Drugging a child so that you can rape their mother is a form of child sexual abuse. We tend to think of child sexual abusers as totally preferential but in reality, many abusers abuse both children and adults. It is also noteworthy that several of the men who raped Gisèle Pelicot have a history of sexually assaulting children or of possessing child pornography. All of these men, including Pelicot, should be thoroughly investigated for other instances of abuse, including the sexual abuse of children.

Dominique Pelicot denies that he committed incest. He claims that he does not know how the posed photos of his unconscious daughter ended up on his computer. He claims the filming of his daughter and daughters-in-law was not due to sexual attraction but due to a desire to “lift the veil.” The reality is that filming your daughter or daughter-in-law naked is incest already, regardless of the reasons you claim to have for it. It is also obvious that he did far more than that. Denial and dissociation are some of the most fundamental patterns of incest. Even a sexual predator as extreme as Pelicot can maintain his dissociation and denial about the reality that he is an incest perpetrator. His wife and victim Gisèle Pelicot joins him in that dissociation and denial by attempting to deny her daughter’s victimization and repress her daughter’s speech. The police take part in this denial and dissociation by acting as if the sexual violence toward his daughter and daughters-in-law are an afterthought and not equally as violent. The police failed to properly investigate his crimes: all the women and girls he had access to should have received toxicology testing and genital exams (with their consent of course). The failure of the police to do this means that crucial evidence could have been lost.

We collectively join in this dissociation and denial when we speak of the Pelicot case as primarily about chemical submission, domestic violence, and rape. When we don’t understand it as a case of incest we erase a huge amount of Pelicot’s violence and the staggering impact of incest trauma on his victims. We also miss the reality that incest is a family system and that all members of the family must take this seriously and get support to ensure that the pattern is not repeated. We miss an extremely important opportunity for education about sexual violence prevention when we don’t talk about the clear and visible patterns of patriarchal incest within the Pelicot family. We all need to learn how to identify and intervene on these patterns.

I want to commend Caroline Darian for her profoundly courageous work of facing and transforming the patterns of incest and sexual violence within her family. Without her claiming her position as a victim of her father’s violence and without her writing the story of her family, we would not know that this is a case of incest. The incest patterns would remain unseen and unchallenged. Not only is she doing her own work to break free of the denial and dissociation she was imprinted with, and to heal from the impacts of her father’s abuse, she is standing up against the minimization and denial directed at her from her mother, the police, and the larger culture. She is also a responsible mother who changed her son’s middle name from Dominique to David (her brother’s name), spoke to her son in an age appropriate way about her father’s violence, and ensured that her son is well supported and in therapy. She is a cycle breaker.

The Pelicot case is a case of incest. Until we begin to collectively identify and intervene on patterns of incest, incest will continue. The extreme nature of the Pelicot case is disturbing but it is actually not unimaginable given what we know about Dominique Pelicot. The chemical submission and mass rapes are an extreme escalation of patterns and behaviours that have been visible and identifiable for a very long time. Dominique Pelicot’s violence could have been noticed and intervened on far earlier if the people in the Pelicot family’s life had literacy around the patterns of patriarchal incest and domestic violence. Yet even with so much available evidence, the incest elements of this case continue to be suppressed.

They move under the cover of darkness. They operate out in the open. They depend on one thing — our refusal to see it for what it is.

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Walking through the streets of Paris together, nearing our two year anniversary, strung out on love, we passed railings covered with padlocks left by lovers. I made some little comment about how dysfunctional a padlock was as a symbol for love — unless of course, I qualified, it’s some kind of BDSM thing. Little did I know that the lock and key emoji would one day become one of our most used.

He and I have a polyamorous love. Not an “open relationship.” The kind of love where we both live with other partners, have serious future plans and dreams with other partners (a baby for me, building a house outside the city for him). The kind of love where we are free to create other connections in whatever way we choose, where we are free to have as much sex and romance with other people as we want. The kind of love where each other’s sovereignty and independence are of the utmost importance, where we work to protect these even when we feel the occasional shiver of insecurity or stab of jealousy. Those feelings do not take up any space in our relationship but neither are they banished to the shadows. We are transparent with each other. We love each other in our freedom. Freedom is a deeply held shared value.

We both have nesting partners but we are not “secondary partners.” Our relationship is not defined by its proximity to or distance from the compulsory monogamy model. The fact that we have made certain commitments with other partners does not diminish or take away from our relationship or our commitments to each other. At every stage of its becoming we allowed our relationship to be exactly what it was, without rushing it up any relationship escalators or pinning it down to any particular label. And yet — our love blossomed and with it our commitment. What we have is really fucking deep and really fucking real.

I remember, early on, writing the erotic love letters that pass for sexting in our relationship, I dared to share a fantasy that could easily be misunderstood in a polyamorous context. I typed the words, my heart beating in my chest — I want to be yours. Leaving no chance of being misunderstood, I qualified that this yours was a polyamorous yours — a deep, erotic desire to belong to him but not one that longed for exclusivity or even priority — a belonging that existed for us inside the container of our own relationship. He liked the idea and he thanked me for explaining what it meant to me. I had always leaned submissive and he was skilled at taking and holding the vulnerability I offered him. Begging to be allowed to be his became an extremely sexy expression of my devotion.

My partner and I both have liberated genders. We are both free to be all of who we are, uncaged by the stifling tropes and roles of compulsory heteronormativity. Our commitment to our own and each other’s freedom does not end with honouring and encouraging each other’s other relationships. It’s about welcoming each other in all of who we are, encouraging our self-discovery, self expression, and growth. We have a growth-oriented love. My partner is a perfect mix of masculine and feminine — hard and yielding. He looks equally delicious in his work overalls as he does in lacy lingerie. My yielding sits inside my power. He sees and loves both and it is precisely because of how truly he welcomes my power that I feel so safe to be so soft with him. I’ve always been more submissive sexually, because I am a powerhouse in my real life and I long to relinquish responsibility in the space of the erotic. He has always known exactly how to let me let go.

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I protected my mother’s identity for so long. I changed my name so that I could write freely without implicating her, and even then, I left out important details of my story because they could lead to her identity being discovered. I protected her because of my deep empathy and compassion for her; because I didn’t want to hurt her. I also hold a deep ethic of opposition to punishment and I don’t believe the internet is the right or best place to seek justice most of the time. But also — I was brainwashed. I was brainwashed by my family into submission. I was told over and over again that I had a feminist mother and I should be grateful. I was told over and over again that nothing really happened in my family, that the problem was not the incest or my father’s rage, but me and my trauma, my anger, my pain.

Last summer I reached a place where truth telling was a visceral necessity in my body. I was (and am) trying to get pregnant and yet it did not feel safe to get pregnant until the spell of unreality had finally been broken for good. I started to write about details I had never written about before, including the fact that my mother is famous scholar of “feminist motherhood.” And I started telling the people closest to me that I was thinking about naming her. Everyone in my life seemed to share the perspective that I shouldn’t name her — that I couldn’t name her. I was reminded of my own ethics about refusing punishment, of my very public opposition to cancel culture. I was reminded of the risks and the dangers, the potential drama. I was advised to find a way to make peace with my situation, to find a way to believe that I had said enough. Then — my mother discovered that I was writing about the fact that she is a famous scholar of “feminist motherhood” and she threatened to sue me. Now, there was pressure not only not to say more, but to say less. To walk back my hard earned truth telling. To be careful.

One of my closest friends at the time responded to my texts about wanting to name my mother by taking on the role of an authority — she told me that naming her would be martyring myself. She insisted that it would be foolish — crazy — to name my mother in the face of my mother’s threats. She spoke with certainty and condescension and encouraged me to go over my writing and make sure everything I’d said could stand up in a court of law. This (ex) friend of mine is not an incest survivor. She has never even been sexually assaulted. She has never been on the stand and interrogated by a defence lawyer. She has never been driven home in a cop car, never to be contacted again. In short, she had no idea what she was talking about. No idea that if my abusive ex parter who had a criminal record the length of my arm, who had plead guilty to putting my body through a wall, who openly admitted to calling me a disgusting slut, was found “not guilty” of rape, of course my respected professor parents and their socially acceptable incest would definitely not be found guilty in a court of law. There is no way to tell the story of incest in a way that will definitely be believed. It is not the act of incest that is forbidden; it is the telling of it that is.

This same “friend” then threatened to call 911 on me because I was experiencing thoughts of self-injury. The insistence that survivors stay silent about incest and the insistence that we are crazy and must be incarcerated go hand in hand.

I managed to survive last summer without being locked up and without walking back anything I’d said. I posted the email in which my mother threatened to sue me on my instagram (without naming her) and 3000 people liked it. She backed off with her threats (I played chicken with my mother and won). I compiled my writing on incest into a zine called The Realm of Unreality. I went to Barcelona and Toulouse and shared my writing with other survivors. I came back to Montreal and launched the zine here, and in preparation for the launch I wheatpasted excerpts from the zine on the walls of my city. The opposite of being silenced — I was letting my story spill out all over the walls. I was making incest something that could be said in public. I told myself I had won. I had refused to be silenced. I wasn’t silenced. But my goalposts had been shifted. I had wanted to name my mother and I had been made to defend my right to speak the truth without naming her. Since I had refused to walk the truth back, and that was already seen as so dangerous, I was supposed to be satisfied. It was supposed to be enough.

It took me another year to name her. In that time, I realized that I wanted and needed to name her. I knew that this impulse was not punitive and was not out of alignment with my principles. I knew that stating that my famous mother who is considered an “expert” on feminist mothering had repeatedly and knowingly brought my sister and I to our grandfather who was sexually abusing us, had allowed and enabled our father in enforcing our submission to our grandfather’s sexual abuse through his punishment, shaming, and rage, had severely neglected her children and offered us no help as we spiralled out of control from complex trauma, had literally rolled her eyes at me when I was seventeen and said “all grandfathers do that,” and had threatened to sue me, at 37, for writing about the fact that my father was demonstrating red flags for escalating his sexual abuse that caused me to need to move my little sister out of the house when I was a teenager — was necessary.

Child abuse is not like other forms of abuse, and it is definitely not like the recasting of conflict as abuse and personal vendettas dressed up as righteous justice that so often constitute cancellation campaigns. I believe that child sexual abuse and incest should be named publicly for the protection of children because children cannot protect themselves. Child sexual abuse prevention cannot depend solely on the naming of perpetrators because most perpetrators are never named, but naming perpetrators is an essential part of child sexual abuse protection, because care givers need to know who not to allow around their children. While I believe that everyone is capable of change and should not be defined solely through the worst things they’ve ever done, child abusers are notoriously sneaky, and therefore it is one strike you’re out. If you abuse children sexually or you allow children to be abused sexually you should never be allowed access to children again. And this goes for all forms of child sexual abuse, including “jokes,” “games,” sexual comments, forced kissing, or any other type of child sexual abuse that we collectively enable by dismissing it as “minor.” No type of sexual abuse against children is minor.

In my mother’s case it is especially necessary that she be named publicly because she is literally an “expert” that countless others defer to on the subject of “feminist mothering.” Her treatment of her children can neither be described as feminist or as mothering. My mother was an abused, neglected, and unmothered child who went on to repeat the cycle. Her career is an elaborate shield in which she justifies the neglect of her children by theorizing that what really matters in the mother-child dynamic is that the mother’s preferences be prioritized at all costs and that mothers never be “blamed” for neglecting or abusing their children.

After I finally wrestled my way through the brainwashing of my family and the larger culture, as well as the well meaning cautions of the people closest to me, and found the strength and courage to do what I needed to do, I was shocked by the anticlimactic outcome. I had protected my mother’s identity so carefully over the years because I was trying to prevent her from experiencing a scandal. Surely the fact that the founder of “motherhood studies” and one of the most internationally celebrated scholars of “feminist mothering” had threatened to sue her daughter for writing about the sexual abuse she experienced in her family would be a scandal. Right? After reposting my essay Monstrous Daughters and naming my mother, and even messaging a few of her colleagues directly I waited and waited and nothing happened. I looked at my mother’s facebook page over a week later and could tell she had no idea I’d even done this. I thought about Andrea Robin Skinner, who had publicly disclosed that her famous “feminist” mother, Alice Munro, had chosen to protect her daughter’s sexual abuser over supporting her daughter, long before her mother’s death, but the story did not get “picked up” until after her mother had died. After all that work of finding my courage and capacity to speak the truth, maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe things would go on, business as usual. My mother would continue to be cited as an expert in feminist mothering and the truth would be buried, because no one wants to talk about incest.

As more time passed, I started to become distressed. I sent off a few more messages to colleagues of my mother and received no replies. I started to lament to my partner, Jay, that nothing was going to happen, that my story would not be included when people engaged with my mother’s work. Jay asked me what I wanted and I quoted Andrea Robin Skinner: “I wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.” Jay listened to me. Later that day they sent me a spreadsheet in which they had compiled the contact information for close to 100 of my mother’s collaborators.

I wrote the following email and sent it to every email on the list, along with a link to my essay Monstrous Daughters:

“I am writing to you because you are somehow affiliated with the field of Motherhood Studies and the work of my mother, Andrea O'Reilly, the founder of the field.

I have recently made the decision to publicly disclose that Andrea O'Reilly is my mother, as well as her role in the sexual abuse I experienced in my family during my childhood, and her repeated attempts to dismiss my trauma, pathologize me, and silence me, including threatening me with legal action last summer.

The reason that I am writing to you and others in the field of Motherhood Studies is because I believe that scholars and researchers within the field need to reckon with this reality. My mother's scholarship is heavily focused on concepts like "mother blame" but does not say anything about real maternal responsibility to meet children's developmental needs and protect them from violence, including sexual violence within the family. Her scholarship reads like an elaborate shield against responsibility for her own abuse of her daughters. Motherhood Studies, especially if it claims to be a feminist field, must concern itself with the rights and wellbeing of mothers, and also the rights and wellbeing of children.

I do not wish to punish my mother or to dehumanize her: violence is a cycle and my mother is also a survivor. I ask that engagement with this information come from a place of truly seeking to understand and end the cycle of violence, rather than punishing and scapegoating individual perpetrators. My mother's mothering wasn't all bad. The best of her mothering is what made me a writer, and it is in writing that I have found the courage to defy her and tell the truth of my experience.

Here is my story. I ask that you answer this call to responsibility by engaging with this truth and considering its implications for the field of Motherhood Studies.

Thank you for you time

Clementine Morrigan”

This email includes a clear call to action — I am asking that those working in the field of Motherhood Studies, who engage with my mother’s work, grapple with the implications of my disclosure. Although I sent this email to nearly 100 people working in the field of Motherhood Studies, it is now a month later and only 5 responded to me. Clearly, though, someone told my mother. By the next day she had posted this on her facebook.

My mother admits that she took my sister and I to our grandfather over and over again throughout our entire childhoods, that she watched him forcibly licking our (and our cousins’) faces in a “game” our family called “slippery slobberies,” and that even after I told her he had put his tongue in my mouth when I was 12, I was still forced to see him until I was 15 and got the police involved. This is not disputed. It is established fact. And yet, publicly, she claims that she has “never abused or neglected” her children. She writes that she is “deeply concerned” about me which is a subtle way to imply that I am mentally ill, and she asks that people do not respond to me so that they cannot get any more information from me.

I watched as her comments filled with support, and as she deleted the few comments which expressed support for me. I remember one comment in particular in which someone who is clearly familiar with my work wrote something like: “What makes people believe that a writer who has written multiple books about incest has not in fact experienced it?” But my mother deleted that comment and any others that suggested maybe I really had been sexually abused. Despite my mother’s refusal to consider that my father is an incest perpetrator like my grandfather, she has, for many years, admitted to me that she knows my grandfather’s behaviour was “inappropriate” or even abusive, that him putting his tongue in my mouth when I was twelve was a sexual assault, and that she continued to make me see him after that, and yet in public, all of that disappears. The only thing that is left is the implication that I am crazy.

An excerpt from one of my mother’s emails where she admits to witnessing the abuse (I have blocked out the names of children). “T” here refers to my grandfather, Ted Conlin:

I am not crazy. I am also not the traumatized teenager, drunk out of my mind, breaking bottles and slashing my arms, screaming about incest, and being taken away with a police escort to the psych ward anymore. The very symptoms of surviving incest are used to discredit incest survivors. Someone behaving in ways we consider crazy and saying they were sexually abused in their family should be taken seriously precisely because “crazy behaviours” are literally evidence of child sexual abuse. But we collectively believe the delusion that “crazy behaviours” are caused by “chemical imbalances” (something that there is no evidence for) instead of trauma (something there is a huge amount of evidence for). I was not taken seriously as a screaming teenager because we live in a culture that collectively works to discipline and punish survivors. But I am not a screaming teenager anymore. I am a 38 year old professional writer. I have been stable and in recovery for close to 15 years. I run a successful business selling my writing, I have two secure long term partnerships, I pay my taxes, and I haven’t had a drink since 2012. My huge body of work is read and translated internationally and I am probably more famous than my famous mother. Yet she still tries to dismiss me as crazy.

Realizing that there would be no scandal and that most people would respond by ignoring me hit like a heavy blow. I realized I had spent decades protecting my mother from something that was never going to happen because most people want stories of incest to go away. I told myself that what matters is that I told the truth and I would continue to tell the truth, and that those who are ready to face this truth would find me and join me in breaking the spell of unreality.

I received endless dms and emails from survivors who were abused, neglected, and not protected by their mothers, including many whose abusive and neglectful mothers were successful, professional, and/or “feminist,” and many whose abusive and neglectful mothers were considered “experts” in their “feminist” or “healing” fields. I did a poll on my instagram in which the majority of people who were abused in their family of origins reported that their mothers focused on their own feelings and desire to be seen as a “good mother” when confronted with their children’s trauma. I wrote to Andrea Robin Skinner and shared my essay with her. She wrote back with the most affirming words. I felt us connected through our extremely similar stories and our shared courage as truth tellers and cycle breakers. I was contacted by Finnish writer, researcher, and activist, Koko Hubara, who is currently do a research project and writing a book in Finnish on the topic of “daughtering,” a feminism for daughters, in part in response to my mother’s work on “resisting daughter-centricity.” We will be in touch to discuss our complimentary work on the subject further. I started to allow this avalanche of support and shared commitment to truth telling to soften the blow of silence from those in the field of Motherhood Studies. I saw that I am not alone, and that together daughters are going to break our way into Motherhood Studies and force a reckoning.

Then I received an email from Alessandra Fraissinet, one of the hosts of an Italian podcast titled Ti leggiamo una femminista. With permission, I am sharing our email exchange here:

“Dear Clementine,

My name is Alessandra Fraissinet, a long-term follower and reader of your work, and I co-host an Italian feminist non-fiction podcast called Ti leggiamo una femminista, with my close friend and collaborator Annalisa Sirignano. We’ve been producing the podcast since 2020, and over the years it has grown a decent following and some recognition from publishers (although it remains self-funded and supported by small listener donations).

I’ve long been a reader of your zines and long-form writing on trauma, sexuality, polyamory, veganism, and cancel culture. I really appreciate your contribution to these topics, as well as your courage and commitment to be a truth-teller. Your work has had a meaningful impact on both Lisa and me, and we could not thank you enough for it.

This is where the difficult bit comes. Earlier this year, Prospero Publishing gifted us a copy of Maternità femministe, a curated collection of Andrea O’Reilly’s work translated into Italian by Veronica Frigeni.

At the time, you had not yet disclosed publicly that Andrea O’Reilly is your mother. While I suspected a connection due to her being Canadian and a world-wide known scholar of feminist motherhood, I was unable to find confirmation of this. Around the same time Lisa and I were discussing this, Veronica Frigeni reached out to us expressing interest in a collaboration. We eventually decided to move forward and feature the book, given that we had never previously covered motherhood as a feminist theme. We interviewed Veronica and released the episode in June 2025.

After discussing this at length, Lisa and I decided to address your story at the end of the interview. We centered our final question to Frigeni, who is also a mother, around the ways in which the professional success and recognition of many boomer women has often come at the cost of their daughters’ safety and wellbeing within patriarchal households, as you have articulated in your work. We specifically named you and mentioned your story because we could not ignore what we knew. We intentionally refrained from speaking about O’Reilly in overly celebratory terms although we did appreciate the ideas expressed in the book.

The episode ended up being one of our most listened-to and most appreciated by our audience.

When I read your Substack Monstrous Daughters and learned that Andrea O’Reilly is indeed your mother, my heart dropped. Lisa and I have since spoken at length about the ethics and implications of having platformed the book, and have been trying to come up with the best way forward. I hope you will believe me when I say that our decision was not made with any malicious intent.

We want to be transparent and take responsibility, since many of our listeners became familiar with your work, as well as with O’Reilly’s book through us. In November, we intend to release a follow-up episode where we:

- explain the context of how we came to cover Maternità femministe;
- state clearly that we believe you;
- reflect on the complexities of consuming the work of authors who have caused harm;
- encourage our listeners to make their own informed choices about engaging with O’Reilly’s work;
- affirm that rejecting her work entirely is a valid response.

Because this directly concerns you, we wanted to reach out before releasing this episode. We’d like to give you the option of adding a statement or comment, should you wish. There’s of course no obligation, we simply want to make sure you’re aware and that the space is open to you if you want to use it. We fully understand that you may not be interested and are ready to face any response.

Thank you for reading this, and for the work you continue to share. We hope this approach feels thoughtful rather than intrusive, and we welcome any guidance from you.
‌
With respect and solidarity,

Ti Leggiamo una Femminista
Podcast transfemminista intersezionale”

“First, I want to thank you deeply for the thoughtfulness of this email, and for the thoughtfulness you describe throughout the whole process, even before you knew for sure that she is my mother. You are answering the call that I have put forth, and did so even when you didn't know that she was my mother, because that call is still relevant for any feminist scholar working on motherhood. The voices and experiences of daughters, and children generally, matter, especially those who have been sexually abused in the family. It matters a lot to me that you are treating me not just as a victim, but as a political thinker in my own right who is bringing something important to the work of feminism. So truly — thank you.

I also really appreciate that you are doing a follow up episode to clarify the connection between my mother and I. And I appreciate you asking for my input. What I would like you to highlight is that child neglect is actually present throughout my mother's work. It's not that she has advocated for truly feminist mothering that meets children's needs and protects children while also allowing mother's their personhood and self outside the role of mothers — and that her personal life did not live up to that vision. In fact, she says almost nothing about children except to mock and dismiss children's needs, and to express nostalgia for a time when it was more socially acceptable to neglect your children.

Here is just one example where she states that in some ways 1950s motherhood was better for mothers because it was more acceptable to be a "bad mother":

I think a lot of well meaning feminists assume that she can't really be serious when she says things like this, and that she really only wants a situation in which the entire work of mothering does not fall on mothers alone. In fact, she really is advocating for child neglect as the solution to the problem of how mothers can have children and still have lives of their own. That is both what she consistently describes in her work, and also what she did in her life.

To me this is a much bigger problem than whether or not people engage with her work after learning that she neglected and abused her children. I think simply opting out of her work is stepping away from the bigger questions. Some bigger questions I would like people to grapple with are: How is it that so many feminists do not seem to notice that she is openly advocating for child neglect? How is it that so many feminists see no issue with a "feminism for mothers" that says nothing about the actual work of mothering (meeting children's needs, protecting children)? Why are children's rights put in opposition to mother's rights and why does no one seem to have a problem with this framing? And finally, if child neglect cannot be the solution to the dilemma that mothers face — what is the actual solution? How can mothers be deeply and robustly supported, allowed space for their personhood, outside interests, and careers, while children's developmental needs are met and their safety and dignity are protected? These are the questions I would like scholars of feminist motherhood (and everyone else) to grapple with.

It is also important to me that the specific dynamic of daughters being offered up as sacrifices in patriarchal families so that mothers can have their freedom and careers be named. I am really grateful that you brought that up in the original interview. I see this dynamic in the case of Alice Munro and her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner. And I have received many dms and emails from incest survivors who have successful, professional, "feminist" moms who did not protect them and in fact demanded their silence. I have written more on this dynamic here:

https://www.clementinemorrigan.com/p/we-need-a-feminism-for-daughters

and here:

https://www.clementinemorrigan.com/p/what-if-your-mom-is-a-famous-feminist

I don't know if it's possible, but if there is a way that you could send me a transcript of the final question in the interview where you asked Veronica Frigeni about this dynamic, I would love to translate it. I am very curious and eager to hear this talked about and curious about her response. Frigeni is the co-editor on my mother's proposed book about "resisting daughter-centricity” which was the final straw for me in deciding to publicly name my mother. Frigeni is one of the first people I messaged to disclose my mother's identity and I have been left on "read" without a response.

I was also wondering if you would be okay with me publishing this exchange on my substack. I sent my article to almost 100 of my mother's colleagues, asking explicitly that they consider the implications of this information in their scholarship on feminist mothering. I received a response from 5 people. Your email and the process it describes model perfectly the sincere engagement I am asking for and I think it would be generative to share it as a model for what it means to not turn away from this conversation.

Thank you again. Your response means everything to me.

Clementine”

“Dear Clementine,

We’re so glad our message came across as intended rather than intrusive or inappropriate.

We’ve taken note of your reflections and questions, and we’ll be sure to include them in our November episode. We also wanted to ask if you might be interested in joining us as a guest speaker on the podcast. Only if this feels right for you and if you think it would contribute meaningfully to the conversation, absolutely no pressure. The only challenge on our end would be accessibility, since a large part of our audience doesn’t speak or understand English.

Please feel free to post our email exchange on Substack if you'd like to do so.

I’ve attached a transcript and translation of our final question to Frigeni. I’ve already translated it for you, but of course feel free to double-check it. For transparency, we’ll also be emailing Frigeni to let her know we’re releasing a follow-up episode.

Thank you again,

Ti Leggiamo una Femminista
Podcast transfemminista intersezionale”

“Thank you so much for the thoughtful response and the transcript / translation.

I’d be happy to come on. Maybe we could just do a very short segment as part of the episode, that way you could translate it and have it repeated in Italian rather easily. Let me know your thoughts.

I’m travelling a fair amount over the next couple months but I am sure we can find a time to record something.

Thanks again for your principled integrity on this. It really means the world to me.

I will post the exchange and a reflection on my substack some time soon.

Thanks again.

Clementine”

Here is the translated question and answer which was asked and answered on the podcast episode about my mother’s book:

“Ti Leggiamo una Femminista: So, we’ve come to our final question, which is less of a question and more of a reflection: while reading this book, we couldn’t help but think about the experience of women like Clementine Morrigan. For those who don’t know, Morrigan is a Canadian writer and activist who has often spoken in her work about the sexual violence she suffered from her paternal grandfather as a child, and about how her mother, a prominent academic in the field of motherhood studies, ultimately failed to protect her from this abuse. We should also note that Morrigan used a pseudonym precisely to preserve her parents’ reputation, as they are both professors and prominent academics who, nevertheless, were complicit in the abuse. In an Instagram post, Morrigan also spoke about how many boomer-generation mothers, like her own, achieved professional success often at the expense of their daughters, choosing not to challenge the patriarchal abuse within their families. We’d like to ask what you think about this, and if you could expand on the difference between emancipated motherhood and feminist motherhood.

Veronica Frigeni: Thank you very much. This is an extraordinarily powerful question precisely because it is also radically unsettling. I think it ties back to why I first became interested in feminist thought on motherhood, which eventually culminated in translating Andrea’s work. I became a mother in 2014, the same year the book on neoliberal feminism was published. That was a historical moment in which the dominant voice within feminism was neoliberal feminism, the idea that you can “have it all,” which we know very well is complicit in upholding structures of privilege and marginalisation within patriarchy. Your question highlights what I see as a blind spot in many progressive narratives on motherhood: the gap between personal, individual emancipation, which is often hierarchical and competitive, and feminist motherhood. Personal emancipation can be a positive first step if it leads toward relational, collective liberation, but all too often, as we have seen, it remains paralysed in complicity with patriarchy, reproducing its very logics of power. Some mothers may have broken the glass ceiling, but who is left to pick up the pieces? In the Italian context, this can be compared to maternalism, an ideology that rewards women for being “naturally” suited to motherhood, assigning them the civic role of society’s moral guides. This is nothing more than another sugar-coated version of patriarchy, a symbolic compensation that keeps its logic intact. Feminist motherhood, on the other hand, is something entirely different: it is a constant assumption of responsibility, political and relational, that is born and nourished within relationships; it stems from feminist consciousness and is therefore inevitably collective. It is an ongoing practice of responsibility, listening, and breaking with complicity, one that interrogates all forms of marginalisation. To put it simply: feminist thought on motherhood, matricentric thought on motherhood, is inevitably transfeminist [meaning cross-feminist — not used here in the sense of a feminism that centres trans women, or trans people, but that would be included in this definition]. This is where we see a considerable distance from the theories of the symbolic order of the mother that shaped a certain strand of Italian feminism. In short, and I’ll conclude here, feminism must start again by asking how motherhood can be transformed, making it not only a site of rupture with patriarchy but also a space of real, concrete alliance with anyone who suffers its oppression and its wounds.”

Despite Frigeni’s thoughtful response to my challenge when applied to my mother’s work in the hypothetical, she has not responded to me or in any way addressed the fact that my mother’s work, which she translates and promotes, is far from being what she describes as “a constant assumption of responsibility, political and relational, that is born and nourished within relationships; [that] stems from feminist consciousness and is therefore inevitably collective…. [that] is an ongoing practice of responsibility, listening, and breaking with complicity, one that interrogates all forms of marginalisation.” My mother’s “feminism” as well as her “mothering,” refuses responsibility, actively works to silence her abused daughter, and upholds complicity with patriarchy, incest, and child sexual abuse. This is not a personal or private matter. It is explicitly political. Because of my mother’s position as an “expert” in the field of Motherhood Studies, it is a necessity that feminist scholars within this field take up my challenge and call to action. I am hoping that Frigeni and others working in the field of Motherhood Studies will take seriously my call to grapple with the implications of my story to my mother’s work. As Friegi herself says, “feminism must start again by asking how motherhood can be transformed, making it not only a site of rupture with patriarchy but also a space of real, concrete alliance with anyone who suffers its oppression and its wounds.” I am one of those who has suffered the oppression and wounds of patriarchy, as a direct result of the choices of my “feminist” mother whose work she promotes. I am asking for solidarity.

I am deeply moved by Alessandra Fraissinet’s answer to that call. Even though she was not one of the close to 100 people who I directly asked to engage with the implications of my disclosure, she immediately did what I asked. Even before she knew for sure that Andrea O’Reilly is my mother, she still felt that it was necessary to include my analysis that daughters often bare the cost of professional “feminist” mothers’ freedom by absorbing the shock of patriarchal violence within the family, when discussing a book on “feminist mothering.” As soon as she realized that Andrea O’Reilly is, in fact, my mother, she decided to go further by explicitly naming this fact and giving space for me to directly express my opinions on my mother’s work.

For all those who feel unsure how to proceed with responsibility in the face of this information — I share this email exchange as a model. This is how.

Clementine Morrigan is an underground writer, cultural change maker, moral philosopher, and brazen truth teller. She is the author of numerous zines and books, including the cult classic zine Love Without Emergency, which will be released as a book with Microcosm Press in 2026. Her popular zine series Fucking Magic was released as a book with Revolutionaries Press in 2025. She co-hosts the podcast Fucking Cancelled with Jay Lesoleil. Her work is known for its unflinching engagement with taboo and difficult topics. She works for a world where the dignity of all beings is recognized and protected.

F*cking Magic is a collection of 12 zines originally hand-made by Clementine Morrigan and posted throughout the world. From alcoholism to sobriety, surviving incest to BDSM, throughout the seasons and many iterations of becoming, Morrigan leans into the darkest and most vulnerable parts of her life in this cult coming-of-age memoir that speaks to taboos and universal truths. You can order it here.

I am excited to announce that I will be a contributor to an important new anthology titled Depsychiatrization, calling for the abolition of psychiatry. “We’re breaking new ground in formulating the immense potential in disregarding psychiatric pathologization entirely. Improving psychiatry is not enough. We need change.” Stay tuned for more info as the project unfolds.

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When I was a child I was a voracious reader. For a long time I have wanted to return to the practice of voracious reading and have set a goal for myself of reading 52 books in a year, or a book a week. I have continued to fall short of this goal due to my eroded attention span from chronic social media use, and the ebbs and flows of my crazy life and complex trauma. This year, I am on track to read 52 books by the end of the year and I think I’ll make it. It feels deeply good to be reading so much, and it feels like reconnecting with a deeply important part of me.

I consider reading a political act. It is an insistence on protecting our attention spans and capacity for deep, slow thought in a time when these things are under attack by capitalism. Literacy is being eroded, and not just the literal ability to read, but also people’s attention spans and capacity to be with ideas for extended periods of time. I also consider reading a spiritual act. Reading fiction is not less important than reading nonfiction — in fact, I think reading fiction is more important. Fiction and literature generally (stories, narrative, whether they been true, invented, or a mix of both) is an exercise in empathy, a practice of living inside someone else’s perspective. This is a deeply spiritual practice, and something the world needs right now. Telling and receiving stories is one of the most deeply human things we can do.

I know many of you are on a path toward more reading. It’s been awhile since I’ve shared recommendations and highlights from my reading practice, so I’ve decided to share some today. I hope to make this a more frequent practice here. Also, check out my bibliography for a long list of works that matter to me. And as always, I encourage you to boycott Amazon. Amazon is evil for so many reasons one of which is that it is killing independent bookstores and small presses. Buy your books at your local indie bookstore if possible or find independent online retailers (do your research because Amazon owns a bunch of online book retailers.) Listen to audio books through Libro.fm, an independent alternative to Amazon-owned Audible that supports indie bookstores, and track your reads on StoryGraph, an independent alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads (you can transfer all your data from Goodreads, don’t worry).

How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ wrote this book three years before I was born, and yet its message resonates clearly. I recommend this book to every woman writer, every woman who wants to write, and everyone who reads, goes to school, or is otherwise engaged in the work of ideas. It is a breakdown of the specific ways women writers are devalued and their work is dismissed. It is a balm for the soul of those of us who do the hard work of writing only to be met with ridicule and dismissal, no matter how successful we are. It is also a wake up call to all of us who swim in the waters of misogyny and may not be conscious of the ways that misogyny shapes how we receive and interact with the work of women writers.

To illustrate the point — compare here these two quotes from Russ’s book to this hater talking shit about me on Twitter:

I am repeatedly accused of plagiarism by my haters, though they never specify who it is they think I am ripping off. I am also always mocked and ridiculed, laughed at and dismissed. The treatment of women writers is intentionally humiliating, especially if we are rule breakers or culture changers. When we say things the world isn’t quite ready to hear (which is literally the job of a writer) we will be treated with extra scorn. If you are called to the path of writing and you are a woman, this book is a must read.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacquline Harpman

There is a very short list of books that I feel compelled to read over and over again. I Who Have Never Known Men immediately became one of those books. This book is absolute literary giant and one that I recommend to everyone who loves strange, challenging fiction. I won’t say too much about it here because it is a story that one must discover for themselves.

It begins in a cell where a group of women are caged. The protagonist is a child, the youngest in the group. She does not remember her life before being locked away there, and she has no knowledge of how she got there. The older women too are unable to say how they arrived there. They live out their daily lives in the cell while two male guards circle them, never speaking to them or interacting with them, beyond preventing the women from inflicting violence on themselves or others. The story sets off from there.

It is a profound, strange, and haunting novel. It has something to tell about the importance of language and storytelling to the human experience. My partner C., who read it because I recommended it, said the most thoughtful thing after reading it. He said he could tell why it resonated with me, because of the importance of books and reading to the protagonist, but also because a direct relationship with her body (her heartbeat) becomes the beginning of all further knowledge.

I won’t say more because I want you to discover this book for yourself. But here is a quote:

“Since I barely venture outside these days, I spend a lot of time in one of the armchairs, rereading the books. I only recently started taking an interest in the prefaces. The authors talk readily about themselves, explaining their reasons for writing the book. This surprises me: surely it was more usual in that world than in the one in which I have lived for people to pass on the knowledge they had acquired? They often seem to feel the need to emphasize that they wrote the book not out of vanity, but because someone asked them to, and that they had thought about it long and hard before accepting. How strange! It suggests that people were not avid to learn, and that you had to apologize for wanting to convey your knowledge.”

If You’re A Girl (Expanded Edition) by Ann Rower

If You’re a Girl was first published in 1991 when Ann Rower was in her 50s. It was her first book but she was an established writer and theatre worker in the New York City scene. In the 2020s, Chris Kraus, her publisher, contacted Rower, now in her 80s, to ask about republishing the book in a new edition. Ann Rower hadn’t been writing or publishing in the last 20 years, following the suicide of her partner, writer Heather Lewis. Rower was excited about the opportunity to rerelease her book and this lead to an explosion of new writing. A new book was created out of the process, one that combined the original writing from the 1991 If You’re a Girl with new writing from Rower in her 80s.

The book is autofiction, mixing fiction and memoir. It moves between time periods in Rower’s life — she reflects in her 50s on her early queer experiences and first coming out when she was a teenager, she tells us in her 80s about her attraction to her physical therapist. The writing is raw, funny, irreverent and also touches on deep love and pain. It is so rare to read across a lifetime like this and so rare to have the honour to read a queer woman in her 80s. For every queer woman who wants to know her history and lineage, for everyone who reads autofiction and memoir, you don’t want to miss this one.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a gorgeous and disturbing novel written in three connected stories about misogyny in contemporary Korea. The main character, Yeong-hye, suddenly decides to stop eating meat after she begins having terrifying nightmares. This sets off a chain of events in which her husband and family try to encourage and then force her to eat meat again. Her resistance continues and she begins to eat less and less while demonstrating stranger and stranger behaviour.

The first two stories are written from the perspective of men (her husband, her brother in law) and the third is written from the perspective of her sister after Yeong-hye has lost her freedom. The book brilliantly reveals the suffering and embodied resistance of a woman living under misogyny from the perspective of those who belittle her, fetishize her, or attempt to control her without trying to understand her.

Gorgeous fiction for those interested in misogyny, embodied resistance, madness, eating disorders, and psychiatrization.

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

Motherhood is my favourite of Sheila Heti’s books. It is autofiction that closely follows the narrator’s internal thought process as she struggles with the question of whether or not to become a mother in the second half of her 30s. This experience — the experience of struggling with the question of motherhood as the fertility window closes — is extremely common and almost never written about. It is an aspect of the human experience that has not been explored in literature (to my knowledge) until this book.

Heti is an inventive storyteller. Much of the story takes place through the narrator’s conversations with a system of divination using flipped coins, based on the I Ching. The question of whether or not to become a mother becomes a spiritual struggle but it is not clear which decision would represent a victory. The question of motherhood is usually presented as a question of knowing: those who have always known they want to become mothers, and those who have always known they don’t. In Motherhood the narrative structure of moving toward the goal of Motherhood or confidently refusing it falls away. Instead we are left with a spiritual struggle, a compulsive, repetitive looping, an obsession without a clear answer in sight.

I recommend this book to everyone because there is so little representation of this common human experience.

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