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Confessional Writing, Transference and Reader Defence. // Paula Gosney // December 2024

First-person confessional writing is an act of visibility. The page becomes a personal, vulnerable space that invites the reader in. An author’s willingness to embrace this vulnerability informs their choice of literary genre, from Sylvia Plath’s auto-fiction The Bell Jar to Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Mirror Book. This essay examines the costs and benefits of first-person confession, arguing that The Mirror Book, which adorns and discards voices as Grimshaw pieces together her identity, is more than an autobiographical account of memory retrieved and crafted into a personal narrative. It is also written as a defensive response to the emotional corrosion caused by her father’s chauvinism and his sexualisation of women.

Everything an author writes, through the process of transference, is somewhat autobiographical. The traditional distinction between fiction and non-fiction blurs in the first-person, raising the question of how much of the author is present in all literature. Grimshaw, a fiction writer, acknowledges this in the first few pages of The Mirror Book, stating that reality isn’t found in fiction, ‘yet there it is, fixed forever, ineluctably, with its disturbingly recognisable strands, its feints and hints, its sly, slippery, elusive darkness’ (16). She also toys with this porous boundary in her short story The Black Monk—weaving the duplicitous fictional character Nick Openshaw into her family story. A divide, similarly fluid between The Bell Jar, Plath’s suicide, and the myth shaped largely by her private journals, Letters Home, with Hughes and her mother altering the first-person authenticity of her voice.

The Mirror Book examines Grimshaw’s life lived through fiction, asking whether a fictionalised life—a fake life lived on the surface—deprives a child of an authentic mirror to develop their own positive identity. ‘This is a memoir about a personal crisis that generated a wider family dispute’ (7), she writes. There is certainly plenty of animosity within her family, however, I suggest the memoir is less about the family dispute and more about the personal crisis of Grimshaw swimming to the surface as she searches for, or in Melissa Febos terms, she returns to, a truer version of herself (118).

Autobiographical narratives are unconsciously constructed, shaped by memory, desire, and fear—micro-stories that play in our minds, overlaid with sensorial experiences, continuously influenced by external factors, including the stories of others. This distinctly human ability evolved over the millennia as a survival mechanism; without community and cooperation, humans die. These narratives are not just linguistic and symbolic; they are rooted in the emotional response of our physical body, supporting the enduring belief that a coherent personal narrative contributes to healing. In this sense, the creation of a literary text like The Mirror Book—born from therapy—resembles the construction of a personal narrative through psychoanalysis. Both language disciplines pull from memory, build on metaphor, and require plausible rhetoric for cohesion. If, as the literary theorist Peter Brooks asked in his essay ‘The Idea of Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism,’ ‘literary criticism is to become a discourse of something anthropologically important’ (337), we must consider the subtleties of form, transference and reader defence. Freud called the transferential process an ‘intermediate realm’ (40), a shared space where the patient transitions from sickness to mental wellness, and Peter Brooks sees it as the realm of ‘as-if’, where the past is brought into the present and converted from memory into a reprint (342).

I particularly like Freud’s use of the word ‘provisional’ cited by Brooks. ‘It is a piece of real experience … of a provisional nature’ (342). The provisional nature is like the art room of the mind, an imagined virtual zone that invites constant reinterpretation where meaning is unsettled. Approaching The Mirror Book with a hermeneutic of suspicion is critically important as we hunt for meaning through a narrative that follows a jumpy timeline, skipping from rebellious teenager, born-again feminist, lonely, shunned wife and needy daughter, each persona brought to the page as Grimshaw pieces together her story. Grimshaw’s life is a literary life, alongside a relationship with a strong and successful male writer, where every moment is potential ‘content’ in motion. Her family is never just a family. It is ‘my literary family’, ‘the literary family’, ‘a literary family’, the adjective repeated on dozens of pages, always drawing attention to her literary roots—the privilege and the cost. This, coupled with the narrative device of using her fictional work to illustrate points, layers thin sheets of defence that readers can admire and see through but cannot get to the tender flesh below.

Norman Holland, a pioneer in reader-response theory, had much to say on transmissibility and reader defence, believing the collaborative creative process between the reader and the text plays an active role in the construction of meaning. If the text is not read, the meaning stays with the writer, static, locked on the page; there is no transferential experience for the author imagining her story through the eyes of her audience, no visibility and no collaboration. Brooks writes of narratives’ anxieties concerning their transmissibility and their desire to become the story of the listener (55). The writer can attempt to control their intention through form, syntax and language, yet the moment new eyeballs take in a sentence, the story now rests in another’s head, filtered through their experiences, desires and prejudices. This transference and the inevitable feedback (imagined and real), an unconscious drive to be seen as trauma writers grapple with their identity in an increasingly complex world. Grimshaw could have remained in the psychoanalysis room or written more cracking quasi-fiction slaying all she took umbrage with, as she did in The Black Monk, but that would have been insufficient. Grimshaw needed to tell her story publicly because The Mirror Book is not primarily about finding a tribe or making a political statement, it is about being fully seen so she can work out who she is. However, this does not come naturally to the author, and in defending herself against those who hurt her, she also defends herself against the reader. ‘I learned one undeniable fact: telling your story is existentially important. This is what I’m interested in recording, the destructive effect of silence and the restorative power of narrative’ (07). This is an appealing statement born of newly acquired personal development, perfectly written for the author’s investigation, but this existential awareness is an internal experience. There is no vulnerable, intimate, intermediate zone in The Mirror Book that draws the reader close, as Plath does in The Bell Jar through her willingness to step into and stay with the anxiety of her experiences.

Holland tells us in The Nature of Literary Response: 5 Readers Reading that the reader weaves the narrative fantasy of the author into the experiences of their own life, creating in themself ‘a dynamic psychological process that transforms raw fantasy materials to conscious significance’ (16). Plath did not write directly about her childhood feelings of abandonment and loss in The Bell Jar, but she did write about being passed over and feeling insignificant. A reader with similar feelings of abandonment will invest in the text and collaborate to access its intended meaning. The reader brings unconscious desire into the realm of consciousness and possibility, creating affirmation through creative content, helping them—often unconsciously—work things out. This process of interpretation from text resembles a reader’s sublimation—a Freudian concept of converting what is uncomfortable or dangerous into a more accessible form—easing burden. From here, transformation can be extracted. A reader observing Esther pushing away those trying to help her may be able to identify similar behaviour in themselves.

Holland’s work on defensive matching of textual form as an adaptive strategy and how this prevents or enhances the creation of an intermediate zone is relevant. He suggests that a net-positive response, creating a net pleasure effect, is required if a text is to slip past reader defences and be of value. He believes we each have one dominant recurring structure of defence, an automatic, unconscious, adaptive means of interpretation that allows us to deal with uncomfortable concepts, continue reading and create pleasure. These coping mechanisms manifest in various ways, like an individual who cracks jokes when uncomfortable. Plath uses denial in The Bell Jar. Esther appears unaware of her mental decline and inability to cope with the immense pressure and expectation that she must be grateful, witty, pretty and pure. This intentional lack of self-awareness invites the reader to lay down their defences—the unconscious fear of their own potential madness—and enter the zone of interpretation, walking through the story with her.

The literary theorist Terry Eagleton writes that the power of artistic form shapes and softens, relaxing reader defence, allowing what Freud calls ‘fore-pleasure’ in the unconscious process (156). How much of my own defences are at play as I resist the Grimshaw narrative? The chaotic structure is a barrier—possibly intentionally; however, I believe it is the avoidance of deeper truths that raises suspicion and courts judgment, pushing some readers away when intuitively, one would expect a vulnerable, truth-based story of gaslighting, rape and trauma to bring readers close. In her Frank Sargeson Memorial Lecture, Grimshaw tells us that her book is a rebellion against fiction in a household where fiction ruled (2021). However, I cannot help but feel as she repeats the family mantra, ‘It’s material; go and write a story with it’ (20), that Grimshaw is moving us from one fiction (that of her parents) to another fiction she is more comfortable with. The author and English professor Melissa Febos writes about this imaginative slumber in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, when a writer isn’t telling the whole truth, mostly to themselves, or if they are performing a persona and not reaching for the greater truth of an experience’ (43).

There are few moments in The Mirror Book where Grimshaw constructs a shared space through genuine vulnerability, taking the reader’s hand and allowing them to see an emotional experience that is not neatly packaged or blamed on someone else. It’s not that there are no traumatic events in The Mirror Book—there are plenty. It is that Grimshaw subtly brushes over them with intellectual distance and language and, on occasion, humour when it gets too real. One of the first examples is when the author is alerted to her husband’s affair. Grimshaw details her physical actions: going for a run, what she saw, flexing her finger, the clever email she sent to her husband, ‘using the woman’s quaint formulation: Are you carrying on with another woman?’ (43). Details that appear to take the reader with her while actually showing little of the emotional trauma of such a heartbreaking and shocking event after twenty years of marriage. Her husband responds honestly, ‘I’ve done a bad thing.’ Grimshaw calls it ‘surprisingly dramatic’ and then writes, ‘I stared at the screen. A bad thing. Somewhere near, sensation was approaching, but I felt nothing’ (43). An out-of-body experience congruent with emotional denial. This sidestepping of ‘real’ emotion is so lightly rendered that it is almost as if we are also being gaslit. Her unwillingness to look at the deeper, reactive emotion that many women in a similar situation could relate to keeps her separate, admired for her prose, but untouchable.

‘I’ve always thought Grimshaw to be aloof, frosty even; of being shored up against the world or somehow walled off’, writes Kiran Dass in Metro (1). This tension between Grimshaw’s innate wish to protect herself, learned from a childhood in a chaotic and dangerous home, and her desire to live a more authentic life is continually present. I suggest this ‘tidying up’ is primarily a defence against her unpredictable father, who did not value familial intimacy, controlled what she ate (190)—tantamount to controlling a woman’s body—and flew into fits of rage. ‘Margaret once remarked that Karl was angry the whole time we were growing up’ (177). Why is her father’s rage written from her sister’s point of view and not from her own experience?

My initial response to The Mirror Book was frustration and slight disdain. I am drawn to honest, vulnerable writing and wanted Grimshaw to be more real. I could feel her crafting of the self: a rebellious youth, a good student—brilliant like her father, an outraged feminist hating on Trump. The setups were too obvious, and I kept asking, ‘What are you hiding?’ Then, listening to Grimshaw’s Sargeson lecture, I realised that The Mirror Book was an act of bravery. After years of being kept in a fictitious box, Grimshaw discovered that expressing her true self and challenging the crafted family image, ‘Lovely childhood, a house full of books’ (17), was unwelcome. Her repeated confession that she had no female friends after a life of avoiding people and her inability to recognise faces revealed the damage. What had silenced her?

In Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Brooks writes of the significance Freud gave to a patient’s ‘no’ during therapy and how the analyst must discover a ‘narrative web’ that affirms the correct path towards recovery. ‘Reading a text is essentially constructive, a filling-in of gaps, a building of fragments into a coherent whole: a conquest of the non-narrative by the narrative, of non-sense by the semantic’ (57). This ‘no’ (only telling some of the story) is the learned behaviour Grimshaw worked through in therapy. ‘Listen, for once, let’s call a spade a spade’ (185) says her therapist. I am not suggesting Grimshaw intentionally omits content. Far from it: I think she works hard to be honest. I am suggesting that one of the most interesting parts of the narrative is her unwillingness to write about the emotional cost of her father’s chauvinistic, controlling behaviour and his sexualisation of women. Either Grimshaw cannot see it—unlikely after twelve months of counselling—or she intentionally avoids it. This sidestepping keeps readers (the public and her family) at just enough distance to make the memoir intriguing and strategically revealing while giving us little of Grimshaw’s true inner life and despair.

‘He commented on a duty solicitor’s nice legs and told me I’d looked ‘very beautiful’ in the dock’ (140). Her father made this comment when he picked her up from court, and she put it in print. It is one of the loudest lines in the book. There is an unconscious internal cost around a young woman’s understanding of consent that comes from living in a sexualised environment. Women brought up in a household with flimsy sexual boundaries, where affairs and promiscuity are celebrated, and where women are continuously reduced to their physical parts, understand, even if they cannot articulate it, that this is the architecture of rape culture. From what Grimshaw reveals in The Mirror Book, it appears that her father sees women as objects: to be admired, to be sexual, to be funny and to behave. She tells us this throughout the text, dropping crumbs like Gretel, wanting someone to see. This is also signalled through the threading of Trump throughout the narrative. It is easy to dismiss the comparison of Trump and her father’s similar sexual attitudes towards women, observing rightly the intellectual gulf between the two. However, Trump’s treatment of women is the whole point. Grimshaw seems unable to express anger towards her father for the same characteristics she loathes in Trump: ‘Sexist, aggressive and so narcissistic’ (35).

Even Trump’s gaslighting is duplicated: ‘Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not real’ (27). Are those Trump’s words or her father’s?

I also suggest Trump triggers Grimshaw because he is the master of setting women up to compete and compare: an effective patriarchal strategy that keeps women separate and creates the isolation she is keenly aware of. Notice the judgemental tone Grimshaw mirrors in this sentence: ‘I watched him flanked by his compliant plastic women and felt a force growing in my mind’ (35). Grimshaw asks, ‘Had I grown up in a sexist environment? Was this linked to my lack of confidence and social connection? It seemed to me comically evident: Karl sure hated a bossy woman’ (25). Trump sure hated a bossy woman.

Grimshaw is cautious about challenging Karl directly because he responds with rage, shame and gaslighting. ‘He called me unworthy’. ‘He wrote smooth patronising emails … he wrote that everything in the family’s past had been perfect, or nearly so, and my memories were wrong’ (27). He also appears to deny or set up the animosity between mother and daughter, keeping two strong women from uniting and focusing on his emotional absence and sexual dalliances. In one passage, while living in England, Grimshaw and her husband speak with her mother about returning home. ‘I had a moment of realisation,’ Grimshaw says. ‘I’d told her we were thinking of returning to New Zealand. She so didn’t want us to, it was striking.’ (16). There are very few reasons a mother would not want her daughter and grandchildren close.

Grimshaw starts another passage searching for evidence of the dichotomy between her experience of her mother and how others saw her (147). The text segues into Karl’s lunchtime fight with a beautiful young PhD candidate staying with the family. Grimshaw writes that Kay started the fight, then Karl jumped in, crushing the young woman’s feminist ideas. The passage is clunky because Grimshaw tries to twist the action to fit her beliefs, writing that ‘Kay would have needed protecting from the young woman.’ Is this sarcasm? The protection Kay needed was from the wandering sexual attention of her husband. Grimshaw continues, ‘Karl had liked the young woman enormously; I’d seen that when they’d brought her to lunch.’

She was beautiful and charming, and Karl was delighted by her company.
He said to me privately, ‘Kay hates her.’
‘Oh? Why?’ I asked.
‘Well, for one thing she’s rather affectionate. Kay absolutely loathes her.’ (148)

Karl, colluding with his daughter, brings her into the titillating secret of Kay’s jealousy. The confidence creates a pseudo-intimacy between father and daughter. Grimshaw does not call her father out or protect her mother. Now three women centre Karl.

Grimshaw has been taught that women are competition, so her only choices are to see the young woman as a flirt or blame Kay for the fight. ‘Look what Kay had made him do’ (148), she states of the man who seems uninclined to do anything he doesn’t want. Even a naive reader can see the narrative: an insecure wife continually betrayed by a flirty husband instigates a fight to protect her turf. That would be a compassionate feminist reading, showing an awareness of power dynamics rather than the author’s inclination to grandstand about Trump. Grimshaw intellectually understands her mother’s situation, often noting her father’s affairs with an almost boys-will-be-boys attitude while never acknowledging the corrosive impact this behaviour has on the family unit and rarely showing sympathy for her mother.

One of the most striking scenes arises from the few sentences Grimshaw allocates to her childhood rape, which is so understated that it is almost invisible.

When I was 13, he [40-year-old man] pulled me into the First Aid room at the baths, announced we were to be married, and proceeded to behave, as he grandly put it, ‘as my husband.’ If I’d complained to the police he would have been charged with rape. (126)

The narrative then jumps from these few short paragraphs to discussing Karl’s intellectual rigour and the Springbok tour of 1981—two patriarchal forces.

The rape of thirteen-year-old Grimshaw has been largely unmentioned in reviews and press. Philip Temple from Landfall described the scene with little comment (1), and Steve Braunias from Newsroom gave the slightest nod towards cause and context: ‘father’s moods, mother’s silences’ (1).

Let us consider a young teenage girl’s fragile sense of self and the often-held belief that they are not enough and apply this to Grimshaw’s sparse writing of this identity-forming experience. (Her retrieval of what is absent, making it textually present, and her inability to give textual detail.) Specifically, her inability to name the incident rape, only writing that he would have been charged with rape if reported to the police. It is either rape or it is not. If we place this alongside her search for a coherent narrative and the desire of her child-voice to be heard, we can see how thirteen-year-old Grimshaw was exploited as she reached for the other—the part of herself she is unable to access. Her need to feel whole, loved and accepted left a void for the rapist to step into, created in part by cultural norms and reinforced by her father’s continual objectification of women.

The episode may have contributed to my sense that I didn’t have any rights. I wasn’t off-limits or inviolable … I told no one, judging that a report would be regarded as off-putting, embarrassing, that the disapproval would land mostly on me. (126)

She must have performed heartbreaking mental somersaults to diminish the experience of this sexual encounter (possibly the loss of her virginity) with a man close to her father’s age. That teenage Grimshaw thought the rape was embarrassing and off-putting, and primarily her fault, tells us a lot about the household beliefs around sexual agency.

The paragraph before this sparsely rendered scene starts, ‘When I was 13,’ going on to describe the perpetrator and the grooming. The rape paragraph quoted earlier starts in the same way: ‘When I was 13’ The repetition of Grimshaw’s age is the voice of a child asking to be seen, suggesting again that confessional writing offers up counter-transference opportunities for the author. It also explains Grimshaw’s growing silence. Paula Morris writes, ‘Grimshaw was so silent that a teacher accused her of “dumb insolence” when “I was actually expressing some kind of mute desperation”’ (1). Most importantly, the insignificance Grimshaw allocates to this scene contextualises her rage towards her mother, the woman who repeatedly failed to protect her.

Our unconscious is crafted from childhood experiences, and it’s the cupboard our ego stuffs memories that are too hard to carry; precisely where Grimshaw would have stored her experience of rape. Freud writes in ‘Constructions in Analysis’ that an individual’s present physical symptoms of neurosis are the surrogate for what has been forgotten or buried through trauma (211). Was Grimshaw’s symptoms her muteness and dietary control?

I wonder how a reader with a similar experience would respond to Grimshaw’s flippant observation of child rape. Would they feel empowered to acknowledge their own experience? To speak up? I suggest this example of negative transference would exacerbate their shame and a belief that they were somehow complicit. The reduction of the rape to nothing to see here quietly reinforces female culpability, passing on shame. In Fiction and the Unconscious, Simon Lesser writes that in ‘many cases far more is communicated unconsciously than consciously. Even when this is not the case, the meanings grasped below the threshold of awareness may make a disproportionate contribution to the pleasure we receive’ (224). Or unpleasure. He says some stories are Janus-faced, saying one thing to the conscious mind while whispering something quite different to the unconscious. We understand the unconscious messages immediately because they trigger past events, but the nuance is not meant to be read on the surface. Our defences resist the anxiety. (218, paraphrasing). This is how a defence of denial—or potential ignorance—allows most readers to pass over Grimshaw’s childhood rape. It is far easier to think of it as a consensual act, though it is not (which is why it is called statutory rape), rather than face the difficult question of promiscuity in a minor and sexualisation as a learned behaviour.

Did Grimshaw’s father’s duplicitous life and her mother’s enabling (‘She didn’t do anything. She wasn’t alarmed’) (126) deprive her of a trustworthy parental mirror to develop a coherent sense of a woman’s value? Grimshaw’s continual reference to her mother’s silent treatment is puzzling. Why did her mother stop talking to her? Did Kay carry guilt, and was her daughter a reminder of the mother she hadn’t been?

The cost of Grimshaw’s blind spot towards her father’s behaviour is an ideology taught to women from multiple societal angles. However, I suggest her mother’s absence caused as much damage, and Grimshaw tells us this.

The ability to cause trauma in subtle and undramatic ways. The ability to shape or distort a self. The ability to create or do damage. This is the power of motherhood (312).

Our mothers are supposed to protect us, teach us how to stay safe, how to form strong female relationships and how to say no. Although it appears that Grimshaw and her mother continually tried to reach each other across a chasm largely created by her father, Grimshaw cannot forgive her mother because Kay chose Karl.

Further issues of consent, grooming and shame can be unpacked from the sexual assault in The Mirror Book and Plath’s depiction of a sexual assault—possibly drawn from her experience at Smith College—but to conclude this analysis, I ask which more effectively creates an intermediate zone for the reader, bypassing defences and encouraging discourse on this challenging subject.

Esther’s low self-worth and the disrespect and handling she tolerates from Marco are relatable: teenage readers connect to her confusion and the belief that she’s ugly. ‘Pretend you are drowning,’ he says as he dances with her body (103). Esther no more involved in their dance moves than one of her cadavers. He flings her drink from the table. His breath scorches her ear. The ground strikes her with soft force. The tension and repetition are part of The Bell Jar’s creative force. ‘‘Slut!’ The word hissed by my ear. ‘Slut!’’ The victim-blaming is repetitive, jarring and dehumanising. Esther’s resistance is in the language. Her detachment is her defence and also the space that allows the reader in. ‘It’s happening, I thought, It’s happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen’ (105). Marco’s indifference to her consent leaves him starkly alone in his women-hating, and Esther flinging her pretty new clothes from the roof is a powerful metaphor for throwing that part of herself away: the pretty part, the sexually attractive part. This use of precise detail, sarcasm and self-deprecating humour is accessible for the reader, ticking off the Holland principles.

Unlike Plath, Grimshaw does not have the protection of fiction as she bravely confesses to sex with a man as old as her father. Her description of rape by a paedophile has been subtly pushed towards a fictional framing to ease her feeling of exposure: Nothing to see here, just a summer at the public pools, but I’ll mention my age twice and the word rape to see if anyone notices.

Eagleton tells us there is no death in the imaginary (162). We cling to the version of ourselves that we can live with, often without critically examining their origins. But there are slips and leaks: ‘I am 13.’

As long as we remain in an imaginary realm of being we misrecognise our own identities, seeing them as fixed and rounded, and misrecognize reality as something immutable. We remain, in Althusser’s terms, in the grip of ideology, conforming to social reality as ‘natural’ rather than critically questioning how it, and ourselves, came to be constructed and so could possibly be transformed. (Eagleton 162)

Grimshaw’s telling is frozen in time by a set of societal and household beliefs that affirm an adult male’s right to groom and seduce a child. This rape culture ideology—often hard to identify—teaches young women, in particular, that their youthful sexuality is irresistible and they are culpable. The repetition of her age may be conscious writing, or the significance of this repetition may have been unconscious. If we read ‘I am 13’ as a question, we can see a young girl asking, did I create this? Is this my fault?

The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is relevant to how much scrutiny the author can withstand, but does it affect the transference between the reader and the narrative in these scenes? One way to consider this is to read the Plath scene as non-fiction. Esther took the diamond, drank and danced and willingly went with Marco to the edge of the golf course. Through a non-fiction lens, the tone changes significantly, illustrating how difficult it is for women to confess to sexual assault autobiographically. A woman’s culpability always lingers close to a crime of sexual violence, allowing challenged readers to blame the woman rather than consider complex societal conditions, power imbalance and our internalised misogyny. When this scene is written as fiction, the audience remains with Esther. An unsympathetic reading with unconscious conditioning around female seduction can easily use this defence to slip, uninvolved, past Grimshaw’s rape scene. This could also happen with fiction, however, in the context of non-fiction (and potential judgment), vulnerable, precise language is needed to subdue reader defence.

We read confessional writing for the same reason we seek out a therapist: for transference and counter-transference. Our autobiographical stories are fragmented and somewhat incoherent, with pieces of the puzzle that do not fit together. For many, like Sylvia Plath, even the puzzle edges are difficult to find. This fragmentation drives our desire to consume the stories of others, looking for our reflected selves to help piece together a narrative we can live with. A psychoanalytical reading of The Mirror Book through a transferential lens, with particular consideration towards sexual trauma and how we defend ourselves as readers (and writers), shows that a narrative’s intended meaning is impacted by reader prejudice and a broader cultural context.

For effective reader interpretation, confessional writing does well to dig for honest representation that has not been curated and is grounded in the individual human experience. Saying this, it would take a brave author to step further into that childhood experience, rendering the awkwardness of a sexual encounter between an adult man and a flirty, rebellious child who unknowingly, accidentally found herself raped in a public building. Telling this story from the point of view of a confused and ashamed adolescent would create a similar, intimate, intermediate zone like that created between Plath and her readers. This contribution would broaden the discourse on consent and grooming to encompass nuanced discussion of childhood sexualisation and the risk factors that heightened vulnerability to predators.

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