‘The anger became bigger than shame’: the writer whose memoir of child abuse has taken France by storm

Neige Sinno in Guéthary, on the Basque coast in France. Photograph: Céline Levain/Mirage Collectif for the Guardian

When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, won a swathe of prizes and became one of the most borrowed books in libraries across France when it was published in 2023. The Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux was so impressed that she made a public appearance in conversation with Sinno, saying: “Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it.”

Now published in English, Sad Tiger – the title is a reference to William Blake’s poem The Tyger – veers between the little girl’s memories of her stepfather blasting French rocker Johnny Hallyday from a cassette player as the hippy family restores a house in an Alpine village, and his attacks on her, during a period when he is scratching a living taking on part-time jobs. Sinno combines the inner world of an abuse survivor with a portrait of life in the French mountains. The book is also a study in society’s denial. The stepfather eventually faces trial, serves a prison sentence, remarries and has four more children after his release.