A Victim of Childhood Rape Close-Reads Her Past

SAD TIGER, by Neige Sinno; translated by Natasha Lehrer

In December of last year, a court in Avignon, France, found 51 men guilty of raping 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot, including her husband of 50 years, who repeatedly drugged and assaulted her, invited other men to join him and filmed their abuse. He was given the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and Pelicot emerged from the four-month trial, whose proceedings were open to the public, a feminist hero.

“All the women on Earth support you,” one sign outside the courtroom read. She became one of Time magazine’s Women of the Year.

Twenty-four years earlier, another French court, this one in Grenoble, found a different man guilty of systematically raping a member of his family, this time his stepdaughter, from when she was around 7 into her teens. Sentenced to nine years in a penitentiary on a nature reserve in Corsica, he served only five.

At the time, the plaintiff, 23-year-old Neige Sinno, was not celebrated for making his crimes public, for protecting others, including her younger siblings, from her stepfather’s violence. Instead, she was made a pariah in her hometown.

“You have looked evil in the eye,” Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, “and now no one can look at you.”

First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser.