In this blistering book, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, Manon Uphoff puts words to the ineffable: a childhood of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. “Reader, I didn’t want to tell this story”, she begins. But when Uphoff’s half-sister dies, the shared wounds of their childhood split open. “I have no choice but to turn back to a history I thought I’d outrun, one that was never mine alone but belonged to all of us.”
As victims often dissociate during trauma, the memories arrive “more in eruptions of odours, colours and images than in language or any coherent narrative”. Reflecting the bifurcation that children rely on to cope with abuse by a caregiver, the narrator, referred to as MM, turns to mythology to describe the beast who entered her room at night. He is that terrifying hybrid, a “minotaur”: “There was a father and a monster (and a father in whose arms I could hide from that monster)”.
Grieving the loss of her six-year old son in an accident, MM’s mother is present but uninvolved. It is the father who bathes the children and keeps track of the girls’ menstrual cycles. “Rage, sometimes I have the feeling it will never be extinguished, that it burns on as an eternal flame”, writes Uphoff. Yet, alongside the heinous acts and devastating betrayal of trust, the author insists that her childhood contained good memories, too, particularly the rituals around Christmas. “Nothing is all a vale of tears.”
Like Vanessa Springora in her memoir Le Consentement and Kate Elizabeth Russell in her novel My Dark Vanessa, Uphoff depicts as a protective mechanism the tendency of victims to cast their abuse as love. “Because if it isn’t a love story”, wrote Russell, “then what is it?” MM craves attention from her “god the father” to feel special in her blended family, which includes four (living) full siblings and seven half-siblings. “To all those who would disparage the position to which I was elevated, I cry: ‘Slander!’ Your childhood world was miserable and beggarly, mine was grandiose!”
While it reads like a memoir, the book is classified as “autobiographical fiction” and some details have been changed. Given the blurring between autofiction and narrative non-fiction, and the fallibility of memory, the distinction in this case doesn’t much matter. “Pen it faithfully in your report”, implores the epigraph, from Faust. And we can assume that Uphoff, in her way, has done exactly that. The so-called “abuse memoir” is a notoriously tricky genre, invariably raising questions about the line between voyeurism and bearing witness. Unlike, for example, The Incest Diary (2017), an anonymous account that raised hackles with its graphic pornographic language, Falling Is Like Flying steers clear of sensationalism…
Read the full review online at the TLS
