The molestation memoir is a much treaded upon genre, a favorite of Oprah and teen readers primed on V.C. Andrews. It’s a genre whose sharpness is wilted by all of its fictionalized versions, with despicable storylines and inevitable grotesqueries that put it always at risk of melodrama. Good literature so often relies on moral ambiguity, and the sexual violation of children is hardly a topic that inspires equivocating sympathy. But “Tiger, Tiger,’’ the debut memoir by Margaux Fragoso, is saved from schmaltz. It reads like a revised “Lolita,’’ told from the point of view of Dolores Haze rather than Humbert Humbert — a Dolores who chooses a PhD over a trailer park pregnancy. In “Tiger, Tiger,’’ Fragoso has given us the definitive portrait of both ruined innocence and misplaced empathy. The book is so powerful because it’s a work of verified truth, authored by the victim under her own name. Fragoso forces us to confront the dark world that exists just barely behind the bright one.
Lolita, only real
In artful debut, Fragoso chillingly details a childhood of abuse
With virtuosic verbal precision, Fragoso summons a past peopled by friends and family who sickeningly seem to only half-know that from the age of 7 she is being continuously molested by a neighbor, Peter, who is almost six decades her senior. Margaux’s mentally ill mother is incapable of protecting her, and her abusive father is the very reason she’s compelled toward Peter in the first place. It all starts one summer day at the public pool when she asks him if he wants to play. He does, and her life is changed forever. The majority of Fragoso’s childhood and adolescence is spent in Peter’s bedroom, where she plays with dolls and writes fantasy fiction, where they watch porn and profess their love. Though the material is presented with first-person immediacy, it’s the later incarnation of Margaux who serves as the book’s omniscient narrator. From her, we learn about Peter’s previous arrests, his estranged family, and all the abused foster children.