The Yale Review | A Shakespeare and Company Interview: Neige Sinno on…

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adam biles
I’d like to begin by talking about how this book came to be. Was this your first attempt to write about what your stepfather did to you? Or were there several attempts, whether through fiction or memoir, before you arrived at the form that ultimately worked for you?

neige sinno
I worked on it in fiction, a little bit in poetry. I think both forms actually work on their own terms; they’re just different. People tend to think Sad Tiger was a hard book to write because it’s on a hard subject and brings back a lot of suffering. And that’s true, but the opposite is also true. It’s almost too easy when you have that material as a writer. The narrative is already given. Something happened to you. And I think that’s one reason why I was so reluctant to engage in memoir—paradoxically. I wanted my art to come first. I didn’t want to use the framework of my life as an easy way to tell a story.

AB What changed?

NS I’m not completely sure what happened, or how it happened. When I studied literature, I wasn’t interested in autobiographical genres. I didn’t think that would be the path for me. For some strange and unconscious reasons, I convinced myself, later in life, to do something I hadn’t wanted to do in the first place. And I really think it’s the form that convinced me. For another project, I decided to write in the first person, and I realized that I was stepping into autobiographical nonfiction. I wrote the first pages, and I put them away. Then I reread them. And when I reread them, I realized what I was doing. I could see what the book could become, and I asked myself, Do you really want to do this? And I didn’t want to do it, but I was so attracted to the form’s potential that I told myself, I’m going to do it anyway.

AB One of the things that feels radical about the book is that you are interrogating its form page by page, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. And rather than try to smooth out the paradoxes or the inconsistencies, you interrogate them. You write, “This is a memoir, not a work of great literature, it’s not meant to be polished, that would make it feel like a construction, would impact its authenticity.” On the same page, you also write, “Dear reader, kindred spirit, sister, I have a confession to make, but I have no desire to mislead . . . . Don’t ever imagine that this is book is a confession. There is no private journal, no possibility of authenticity.” Did you feel these paradoxes and these tensions as you were writing, and was it a difficult thing to negotiate in the work?

NS If I say that the genre of this book is memoir, or testimony, it has to follow certain rules. It has to sound authentic, for example. But it’s always a construction too. I want my reader to feel the weirdness of the form. Because on the one hand, it is implied that I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to make anything up. But even a confession is a construction, and even when I don’t invent any fact or situation, there is an aspect of creativity, of craft. And, of course, when craft is involved, the confession is polished, though in an unpolished way. I want my readers to be conscious of this paradox. I don’t want them to read this book thinking that they’re just hearing someone tell their life story. I don’t tell everything. I tell the things I need to tell. I write the words I need to use because I want to produce a certain effect. And even an eyewitness account or an article in a newspaper works this way. The act of reading is built on some expectations that the text either fulfills or doesn’t.

But most of all, I’m a reader. I love that paradox of creating meaning and deconstructing it all the time. I wanted to make the reader concretely aware that she is reading. But I didn’t want to be too theoretical, or too meta, or too postmodern. I wanted to convey the feeling that there’s something raw about this conscience exploring itself.

AB There’s something about the form that is particular to what you’re writing about. It’s not like you could take the form you landed on for this book and apply it to another project. Perhaps the only way that this kind of abuse can be apprehended by the reader, if not comprehended, is through the presentation of these paradoxes.

NS I was trying to tell the story of how my brain works. And my brain works like this because of trauma. There’s no authoritative voice in that head. All these voices are always fighting each other. I wanted the reader to perceive—to feel—what’s going on in my brain when I think about this. How unconcluded everything is. Every time I tried to find something stable, I always saw the other side, and it became unstable again. And I tried to mimic that very strange and unsatisfying process. It’s also an ontological question. It’s the desire to try to understand something that you know you will never understand. I wanted the form, the sentences, the paragraphs to take the form of spirals, never reaching closure.

AB There’s been this theory put forward that every time we remember something, we re-create the memory—that our memory is constantly rewriting itself. For you, memory doesn’t seem to work that way. You talk about not having a particularly good memory. But you write that those memories of rape and abuse have congealed in your brain. That they are unchanging. That was really interesting because you had to tell these memories twenty or so years ago at the trial, and you’ve had to retell them in this book.

NS I have those very detailed memories, and they’re frozen. I can be there anytime, as if I were projected into a movie scene. But I’m also not sure that they actually happened the way I remember them. They’re in my head, for sure, but are they a faithful reflection of what happened? Where’s the truth? I don’t know. My memory of something doesn’t confirm that it happened. In my case, I was lucky that my abuser confirmed some of these things I said. But in lots of cases, for many people, the abuser is going to say, No, she’s lying. It didn’t happen. And the problem is that he’s the only other witness.

AB You write that the most interesting thing is what’s going on in the perpetrator’s head, even as it is beyond comprehension. At first, I was looking for the moment, the sign, the key: This is what made him do it. And it’s not there. There are details that one might interpret as contributing factors, but there’s no answer. Did you ever think that, through the process of writing, you might find one? Or was it clear to you that it was beyond comprehension?

NS Well, there is, at some point, an explanation: he did it because he could. And that is at once too simple and too complex to satisfy us. He’s not that different from me. He’s not that different from you. The thing that makes him different is what he chose to do. He’s not a born monster. He probably had his own reasons for doing what he did. But the mystery of evil is in that choice. We are not going to grasp it. It’s one of the great philosophical issues that we can’t come to grips with. I knew this from the beginning. I say this on the first page: I’m going to try to understand better, to make things visible, but I know I’m not going to find that key. And the reader is not going to find that key. But, still, we are driven by the need to find an explanation, which in a way accounts for our fascination with evil—it is what we don’t understand.

AB You just used the word evil. It also comes up repeatedly in the book. It has become quite an unfashionable word. And yet I think you give a sense of where its use feels justified. You write that what fascinates us about a monster is that we think they hold the clue to understanding evil. It’s like that Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, who, when asked about obscenity, said, “I know it when I see it.” We might not be able to define “evil,” but we know it when we see it, and we don’t want to go there.

NS There’s a paradox in this too. I don’t want to be like him, so I’m not going to know what he knows. I can’t make that step. I don’t want to experience what he experienced. I want to stay on my side. But it’s strange because I’m attracted to what I think he knows, although he probably doesn’t know. No one has the key.

AB It’s clear from what you’ve written that your stepfather considered himself a good, moral man. Character witnesses came forward at his trial to say this too—that apart from these things he confessed to doing, he was a good man.

NS It would be so much easier if monsters existed. But any of us could turn into a monster any day. I mention a documentary about people in jail who had all been child abusers. One of the abusers said that if you had asked him five minutes before he did it if he was capable of doing something like that, he would have sworn he could never do it. And then he did it. He became someone else. Every day, I choose not to become that person. If I am choosing, he also chose. But it’s all hypothetical reasoning. It is still very mysterious to me how someone crosses the threshold into evil.

AB One way you try to understand what your stepfather did is through books. You spend quite a bit of time near the start of the book talking about Lolita, and Nabokov, and what a surprise it was for you to find the articulations of the situation so close to what you experienced.

NS Every child who is a victim of abuse is conditioned to believe that it didn’t really happen, or at least to doubt the reality of the abuse. Some even have traumatic amnesia and bury the memory completely. It happens in a surreal moment. You’re always alone with him. No one sees it. It doesn’t exist on the same level as the rest of reality. You know it’s real because you’ve been through it. It’s in your body, and you know it’s some kind of violence that has been done to your being. It has some kind of existence. But it doesn’t really exist as the rest of life exists. To read a story of this experience as something writable was strange for me. And the fact that it’s fiction makes it, in a weird way, acceptable to the reader. There’s a sort of safety to reading it. We are able to accept being in the mind of Humbert Humbert. I think I read it as fiction too. As a work of the imagination. It took some time for me to realize that what happened to me had something to do with the story of Lolita.

AB Apparently, one way to read Lolita
is as fantasy, because the dates just don’t add up. I was thinking of that while reading Sad Tiger—of the stories that abusers tell themselves. In the case of your stepfather, his story was that he did it because you refused to love him.

NS They have to survive too. Their survival depends on living with what they’re doing. Everyone has a different way, but we have to tell ourselves stories that make our lives livable. And how can you make your life livable when, at night, you rape your stepdaughter? He probably had to construct a very strong fiction or a very strange, twisted story to convince himself that he could go on doing this. Humbert Humbert tricks himself. He lies to himself. Which is why, at some moments, it’s like a puzzle. He realizes that it’s a tale he’s telling himself. In one moment, Humbert and Lolita are in a hotel room, and he catches sight of her in the bathroom mirror without her knowing she’s been seen. He sees her complete despair so clearly—he knows what he has done. But then he starts building his story again, because he needs that story to keep his universe from collapsing.

AB Often, people present writing their own story as a way of freeing themselves from that story. But that is not what happens in Sad Tiger. Instead, we almost feel a suspicion of the story, or a warning against it.

NS I don’t want to work in the same way manipulators do. I don’t want to get into someone else’s head and convince them that my version of the story is better or makes more sense. I don’t want to enchant the reader. I think that’s one reason why there’s a suspicion of storytelling.

AB In one moment, you’re talking with your lawyer about your stepfather’s version of events, and she says, “Oh yeah, his story was completely mad.” The act of storytelling really strikes the reader here, because to this external person, his version of things is just ridiculous.

NS She said that many years later, after the trial. Most of the time, abusers are good storytellers. He was someone with charisma who could convince you of something completely mad, not because of what he said but because of his position of power. With distance, you retell yourself the story, and you think, How was I able to believe that version? But in the moment, and even during the trial, when his guilt was evident, there were people who said that, apart from this, he was a good man. And people believed him. Most of the time, the victim is someone whose language has been destroyed. Whose relationship to truth has been destroyed. The victim is the one who lacks charisma, who is unable to articulate the other perspective. Lolita doesn’t speak. She has no place to tell her side of the story, because her muteness is her place in that story. She’s voiceless.

AB You say that you can’t write about something unless you have already “done the work” in some way. I wonder if that might be a fundamental difference between writing fiction and writing fact. Fiction potentially has therapeutic qualities, even if you don’t know it while you’re writing, whereas this kind of project can’t provide that.

NS Maybe fiction is more connected to the unconscious and to releasing control. But I’m not writing as a way to feel better psychologically. I’m doing this because I think I’m going to write an interesting book. If it were true that writing this book was therapeutic, I would say it, and I would be glad. Why do I feel better now that I’ve written this? I could explore that question. Maybe someone else who writes about this for the first time, who makes a story out of a strange and painful magma, could find it therapeutic. It could give them a way to articulate things. But that’s not the case for me. I’m not telling this story for the first time. It’s something that I’ve been telling, and working on over and over, for years. It would lessen the work to think that I’m doing this for myself. I did not write this book to come to terms with my problems. I was just trying to make the best work of art that I could make.

AB You write that you wanted the book to exist but hoped it wouldn’t have too many readers. That hasn’t happened. The book has sold a lot of copies. There have been a lot of readers. Has the reception of the book changed your view of it or of its potential?

NS When I wrote this book, I was afraid of what could happen if it were widely read. I knew this possibility existed. My fear was about the consequences of this book finding a large readership and about the reasons this could happen. I totally agree with what David Foster Wallace said in his interview with Charlie Rose—that a writer is often a split being. On the one hand, you are a nerd who doesn’t want to be bothered and who is pretty happy staying buried in the library, but on the other hand, you desperately want some attention, and you dream of writing something that makes everyone drop to their knees. But then you can never know if this attention is for the right reasons.

AB In the last four or five years in France, there have been a lot of high-profile trials, campaigns, discussions, and books about sexual abuse. Is this a hopeful sign that some of the taboos are falling away?

NS I would love it if #MeToo really became a revolution for us, if we could see real change in our lifetime, if we could really seize the opportunity to put all this on the table and do things differently. That would be great. But it’s hard to know. It’s too early to tell.