I FEEL REAL GUILTY

In this memoir, Epstein writes of her experience as a survivor of abuse, and how she spent years hiding her story and battling secret feelings of shame.

In an impressive series of vignettes, the author chronicles her adulthood after living through a childhood marred by sexual abuse by an older sibling. The author clarifies her painstaking efforts to understand how her trauma informed later behavior in frank discussions of hypersexuality in early adulthood, her domestic struggles during two marriages, and her use of therapy and writing to better understand her experiences. She also writes about her work to cultivate a public persona as an advocate for survivors of sibling sexual abuse. Over the course of this memoir, Epstein recounts startling moments of clarity during the early stages of reckoning with her past, including painful recollections upon opening a photo album (“Despite the happy memories captured in these images, I couldn’t shake the notion that something was amiss in our family”) and having a stilted conversation in 2019 with the person who’d sexually abused her for six years. Epstein’s writing is strongest during these moments, which have a disarming vulnerability that will draw readers in. She also relates her journey toward forgiveness in simple but elegant prose. At some points, though, the memoir’s high level of detail—as in a drawn-out account of a conversation between the author and her husband, which ends with a trip to the bakery—slows the book down, and these lulls grow more frequent as the book progresses. That said, Epstein succeeds in her goal of bringing attention to a shockingly common and tragically underrepresented form of abuse, marking a milestone in her ongoing advocacy project.

An important and often moving remembrance.