The Roanoke Girls—Amy Engel

Content warning: childhood sexual abuse, rape, incest

When Lane was a teenager living in New York, her mother committed suicide, and Lane went to live with her grandparents and cousin Allegra in rural Kansas. Her mother never told her much about their family, so Lane has no idea what to expect. After one summer, Lane flees Kansas, and then spends the next decade of her life descending into alcoholism and depression. When she receives a cryptic email from Allegra, she ignores it, until she gets a call from her grandfather to say that Allegra has gone missing. So begrudgingly, she returns. "But it also means facing the secret that made her flee, the one she may not be strong enough to run from again."

Can YOU guess what the secret is?

If you guessed childhood sexual abuse, DING DING DING! Tell them what they've won, Bob!! Well, I made a mistake and decided to give this book a chance, imagining that the secret could be anything other than what the secret ALWAYS is when a woman has fled her hometown, has to return for some reason, and then ends up Confronting Her Past.

I blame Gillian Flynn for this recent resurgence of faux-literary "noir" books. Her success makes everyone think they can do it too. It is very clear that Engel's intention is to be considered literary with sentences like, "But one long summer here at Roanoke is somehow imprinted beneath my skin like a tattoo of memories running through my veins" and "I run my fingers over the eye shadow, golden glitter sticking to my skin, and like a blind person reading braille, I feel the bumps and ridges of letters under my fingertips." Ugh. She definitely missed the mark there.

It's also VERY clear that Engel is a former YA author. There is a subset of YA authors who—much like a child star who decides to take an oversexualized role to show everyone they're a grown up now—decides to go with the most personally upsetting and appalling situation they can imagine and make a book out of it. Sensationalism for sensationalism's sake is just that. It is not inventive, it is not new, it doesn't add anything to the literary landscape. It's not titillating, it's just exploitative.

The first part of the "big reveal" is clumsily hinted at throughout the beginning of the book until it is hamfistedly revealed on page 32. After all, the conceit of the story is not about leaving the abuse a mystery. The second part of the "big reveal"—that not only has Lane and Allegra's grandfather been sleeping with his granddaughter, he actually started by sleeping with his sister, and every one of the so-called Roanoke girls is not only his victim but his daughter as well—doesn't come until a bit later. At that point, you pretty well know it's coming. It is also not a surprise.

However, rather than representing these girls as the victimized, brainwashed, Stockholm Syndrome sufferers that they are, the toxic, incestuous relationship with their grandfather/father is portrayed in an incredibly romanticized manner. This could have been a study in the psychological power of someone with charm, the strength of isolation and insulation on developing young minds, and the manner in which cult survivors are inured to a certain lifestyle. But instead, we see people who were not abused by this man continue to support and maintain this secrecy, including his wife, the housekeeper, and the ranch hand. His wife especially, who is the mother and grandmother of the girls, has been letting this happen under her own roof for decades, and believes that THE GIRLS ARE GUILTY BECAUSE THEY ARE SEDUCING THE DAD/GRANDFATHER.

Even Lane, who is "the one who got away," BARELY makes an attempt to call out the abuse, and feels almost jealous of her grandfather picking Allegra to abuse. Lane recalls one of her most vivid memories of her mother: "We'd been lying on her bed in our apartment, on our sides, facing each other. I was ten. She was tracing my face with her fingertips, and I remember being happy. Happy she was paying attention to me, focusing solely on me without tears or trepidation. 'Right now,' she whispered, 'you look exactly like your father. I loved him so much.' I thought maybe she was finally going to tell me some detail about him, but before I could ask a single question her hand trailed lower, around my neck. She squeezed. Gently at first, so that I didn't wrench away as fast as I should have, then harder, her nails digging into my skin." (45) She loved him? Her dad who raped her, and she fled with Lane, her child, to prevent the same thing happening to her, and she loved him? Nope.

Allegra, the missing cousin, is used as a plot device and as a method of character development for Lane, in much the same way that rape in a female character's background is often used as a lazy means of showing how "strong" she is. Allegra exists purely in relation to others and not to be even the brainwashed, psychologically damaged representation of her own person.

Of course, despite over a decade of descent into alcoholism and general disconnectedness, Lane is saved from it all by the love of a good man, her teenage sweetheart. Isn't that easy and nice? Even the fact that she had an abortion that she never told him about barely provides two minutes of conflict, and doesn't hinder or even slow down the happy ending that Lane gets after her cousin is confirmed dead.

The Chicago Review of Books summed it up pretty well: "Ultimately, The Roanoke Girls is a tale of violence against women paired with victim shaming. This cheapens the characters, the descriptions, and the tale itself. Engel writes masterfully manipulative men, but the women are consistently framed as villainous, weak, or stupid enough to be abused. The ending is frustrating, because the implication we are left with is that since a single woman escaped the violence, it is acceptable, despite the cost of the generations before her." (The Kirkus Review also said it was "sordid, unrealistic, and unredeemed.")

I say, avoid at all costs. Especially if, like me, you may be a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who had no warning before you started the book, and for whom panic attacks ensued.

My Absolute Darling

Although I finished this book over a month ago, I was moved to come back and review it in earnest following a conversation that is currently happening around a new release book, My Absolute Darling. It is admittedly a slightly different situation because one of the major points of contention with that book is that it's written by a male author about a female character who is sexually abused by her dad. But the similarities were too striking, with the incest and the romanticization of that situation, it brought Roanoke Girls right back to the forefront of my mind.

I first heard rumblings about issues with the book on Twitter. I follow a number of people in publishing, because it's something in which I have a great deal of interest and curiosity.

This was the Tweet that started it for me.

Can we just talk about how many men seem to be writing revenge fantasies about female rape survivors and how grotesque that feels?

— Jim McCarthy (@JimMcCarthy528) September 5, 2017

Then there was this thread about the topic of men writing about female sexual assault survivors:

I think a lot about why male writers feel so comfortable writing about the sexual assault of women and girls.

— Tess Sharpe (@sharpegirl) September 5, 2017

This piece of the thread was striking to me, and stuck with me:

And ask yourself "Why do I want to tell this story?" and "Am I the person to tell this story?" and "Who might I hurt if I tell this story?"

— Tess Sharpe (@sharpegirl) September 5, 2017

In the replies to Jim McCarthy's Tweet, he gave hints about the book he was referring to, including that it was going to be on the Best Seller list the following week.

The thing that really struck me was that, when I searched for reviews, EVERY SINGLE ONE on the first page of results in Google was glowingly positive, saying that the book was "difficult" and "challenging" and "hard to read" but a "remarkable debut."

Then Roxane Gay was reading it:

Y'all hyped this book I just bought buuuut so far it isn't ummmm. Yeah.

— roxane gay (@rgay) September 6, 2017

Men writing about sexual abuse like it's romantic. Ok. Ok.

— roxane gay (@rgay) September 6, 2017

And she reviewed it on Goodreads, even still giving it three stars despite the problems she readily admits exist. Which was interesting to me.

So I've curiously, and with an ever increasing rage, been watching how this develops. I have yet to see a truly critical review from a mainstream source.

The questions surrounding representation, writing characters that have experienced things that you as an author have not experienced, and especially men writing female characters who have survived abuse (and the romanticization of that abuse that often accompanies the past), are questions that I consider quite regularly. I don't know that there's an answer. But I DO know that there's an overabundance of men who are INCREDIBLY quick to throw rape into their lead female's backstory as a means of fleshing her out, often without ever even trying to deal with the ramifications or aftermath that past abuse might cause.