On Writing Around the Thing

There are moments when the prevailing culture leans forward and asks for testimony. Now, it says. Name it. Say what happened. Break the silence.

We are in one of those moments again. The Epstein files, the resurfacing of institutional abuse, the familiar choreography of shock and denial. Each time this happens, survivors are quietly summoned to speak, as if truth is something that can be produced on demand, as if naming is the same as understanding.

I am writing memoir that describes abuse, but I am not publishing that material yet. What I am learning, slowly, is that memoir is not disclosure. It is not confession. It is not evidence. It is something far more exacting: the dismantling of the frame that made the experience survivable in the first place.

What many forms of abuse share, whether carried out by a lone individual or groups protected by networks of power, is that they rarely arrive as force alone. They arrive as meaning. As specialness. As being chosen. As maturity. As intimacy mistaken for equality. The harm is not only what is done, but the story that makes it make sense at the time.

That is why writing it is so difficult.

The current focus on Epstein risks obscuring this, because spectacle pulls attention toward acts rather than structures. What those networks reveal is not exceptional appetite, but extraordinary confidence: the confidence that no one will intervene, that consequences are negotiable, that secrecy is collective. Power doesn’t need to persuade when it knows it will be protected.

Writing memoir alongside this public conversation is uncomfortable. Abuse thrives where friction is removed, not just legal friction, but narrative friction. When institutions, families, or communities smooth over contradiction, the story becomes blunted. The child adapts. The adult moves on.

Memoir, at its best, reintroduces friction.

Reading other people’s memoirs about abuse has shown me this. The most truthful ones are rarely linear. They hesitate. They circle. They contradict themselves. They spend more time on language than on events. What stays with the reader is not a catalogue of acts, but the slow realisation that what was offered as love, mentorship, or initiation was also a way of avoiding accountability.

What is striking is how often these books resist premature clarity. They refuse the clean arc: harm, insight, redemption. Instead, they linger in uncertainty. They show how long it takes to relocate shame, to move it off the body of the child and back onto the structures that enabled the adult, if that happens at all.

This is why writing memoir in the shadow of public scandals is so fraught. There is pressure to be useful. To clarify. To contribute a story that fits the moment. But clarity rushed can become another form of silencing. It can freeze meaning before it has been properly examined.

I am learning that the hardest part of writing this material is not remembering. It is unlearning. Unlearning the language that once made survival possible. Unlearning the belief that responsibility was shared. Unlearning the habit of minimising harm in order to preserve coherence.

The writing is where this work happens, not quickly, not heroically, but through repetition and restraint. Writing does not rush toward the event. It asks how power operated, how silence was maintained, how doubt was cultivated. It asks why certain stories were easier to tell than others.

This is not a refusal to speak. It is a refusal to perform disclosure on cue.

There will be a time to say what happened. For now, the work is understanding how it was made possible, and why that understanding matters more than ever. To me, and maybe to those of you out there, sadly too many, with similar stories

This essay was prompted in part by listening to Louise Allen speak on The Radical Podcast, and by her memoir Thrown Away Child, alongside wider public conversations about power, silence, and abuse.