What do you think?
Voices in the Night: Women Speaking About Incest
Book by
187 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1982
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 4, 2015
Like I Never Told Anyone I reread this anthology as background for my novel in progress, one of whose main characters is an 11-year-old girl who's been molested by her stepfather. Voices in the Night is likewise a collection of stories, memoirs, and poems by incest survivors, and it's every bit as worth reading. Unfortunately, it's also hard to find, because it was published in the pre-digital age by an independent feminist press.
Voices in the Night is generally more immediate, less polished, than I Never Told Anyone. Feminist presses of the 1970s and 1980s focused on getting into print the voices of women who were rarely heard in mainstream publishing. The anthology was crucial because so many women writers didn't have the wherewithal or the desire to complete book-length works. Feminist-press anthology editors encouraged stylistic variety. As editors Toni McNaron and Yarrow Morgan note in their introduction, "We have chosen to include letters, prose poems, and ritual as well as more familiar modes." Of the "more familiar modes" poetry is much more in evidence here than in the mainstream anthologies -- and a good thing too, because so very much of the best feminist writing of the 1970s onward has been poetry.
This book is well worth seeking out. While you're looking for it, ponder why it's so hard to find, and especially why there have been so few first-person survivor anthologies published since the early 1980s, which is when both Voices in the Night and I Never Told Anyone first appeared.
Voices in the Night is generally more immediate, less polished, than I Never Told Anyone. Feminist presses of the 1970s and 1980s focused on getting into print the voices of women who were rarely heard in mainstream publishing. The anthology was crucial because so many women writers didn't have the wherewithal or the desire to complete book-length works. Feminist-press anthology editors encouraged stylistic variety. As editors Toni McNaron and Yarrow Morgan note in their introduction, "We have chosen to include letters, prose poems, and ritual as well as more familiar modes." Of the "more familiar modes" poetry is much more in evidence here than in the mainstream anthologies -- and a good thing too, because so very much of the best feminist writing of the 1970s onward has been poetry.
This book is well worth seeking out. While you're looking for it, ponder why it's so hard to find, and especially why there have been so few first-person survivor anthologies published since the early 1980s, which is when both Voices in the Night and I Never Told Anyone first appeared.
August 17, 2011
Sad stories of the aftereffects of incest; how it breaks women apart, how it binds them to recurring nightmares. A short story of mine is published in this book. Along with Audre Lorde. I am not who I was then.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews