I Feel Real Guilty: A Memoir of Sibling Sexual Abuse

by Jane Epstein

Overview

I'm sorry for what I did to you when you were younger.

When Jane Epstein's brother makes this confession, a tsunami of memories floods over her. She remembers the years of sexual abuse at his hands. The pain. The shame.

Suffering from trauma few talk about, Epstein searches for solace in strip clubs and hotel rooms. She finds love, loses it, and loves again. Years pass before she dares to dive into the depths of her past. Only then does she begin to heal.

Though nothing can restore a stolen childhood, and nothing can reclaim lost innocence, I Feel Real Guilty is more than the raw, unfiltered tale of one woman wrestling with her demons. It's a call to arms, an invitation to survivors to speak out and reclaim their power.

Epstein's story shines a spotlight on the secrets of sibling sexual abuse, providing a ray of hope and strength for those still trapped in their own private darkness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781990700309
Publisher:	Life to Paper Publishing
Publication date:	09/09/2024
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

Editorial Reviews

2024-07-12
In this memoir, Epstein writes of her experience as a survivor of abuse, and how she spent years hiding her story and battling secret feelings of shame.

In an impressive series of vignettes, the author chronicles her adulthood after living through a childhood marred by sexual abuse by an older sibling. The author clarifies her painstaking efforts to understand how her trauma informed later behavior in frank discussions of hypersexuality in early adulthood, her domestic struggles during two marriages, and her use of therapy and writing to better understand her experiences. She also writes about her work to cultivate a public persona as an advocate for survivors of sibling sexual abuse. Over the course of this memoir, Epstein recounts startling moments of clarity during the early stages of reckoning with her past, including painful recollections upon opening a photo album (“Despite the happy memories captured in these images, I couldn’t shake the notion that something was amiss in our family”) and having a stilted conversation in 2019 with the person who’d sexually abused her for six years. Epstein’s writing is strongest during these moments, which have a disarming vulnerability that will draw readers in. She also relates her journey toward forgiveness in simple but elegant prose. At some points, though, the memoir’s high level of detail—as in a drawn-out account of a conversation between the author and her husband, which ends with a trip to the bakery—slows the book down, and these lulls grow more frequent as the book progresses. That said, Epstein succeeds in her goal of bringing attention to a shockingly common and tragically underrepresented form of abuse, marking a milestone in her ongoing advocacy project.

An important and often moving remembrance.

Kirkus Reviews