Discussed in this essay:

The Incest Diary, by Anonymous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 144 pages. $18.

The Incest Diary is not an abuse memoir, though it is an account, a true one, of sexual abuse. Its anonymous author was first raped by her father when she was three years old; they last had sex (“consensual” sex, for what it’s worth, though one thing the book shows is just how little that sometimes is) when she was twenty-one. During that final encounter, at her childhood beach house, after gin and tonics on the porch, she “had an orgasm bigger than…