Voicing experiences of childhood sexual abuse counteracts the techniques perpetrators use to sustain their patterns of criminal abuse; namely, silencing the victim and controlling the narrative about what happened. Sad Tiger, by Neige Sinno, recently published in an English translation by Natasha Lehrer, is an intelligent hybrid of survivor memoir and literary criticism. A sensation when published in France, it was shortlisted for the 2023 Prix Goncourt, and joins Consent, by Vanessa Springora, as well as the unbound story of Andrea Skinner, daughter of Alice Munro, as told through essays and letters, to correct the record of each of their girlhoods.

Newly discharged from my stay in the literary ICU that is Garth Greenwell’s novel Small Rain, I still had tubes, monitors, and groggy returns to consciousness on my mind when I encountered the narrator of Valentijn Hoogenkamp’s Antiboy waking up in a hospital bed. Surfacing from the anesthetics, Antiboy, Anti for short, tells the story of Hoogenkamp’s transition and coming out. Described by the publisher as a nonfiction essay, but reading like an autofictional novel, this is the second book by the Dutch writer and artist, who is nonbinary and uses the pronouns he/him.