The Temp - Softcover

(What the narrator always returns to is a manuscript she's writing, one that ultimately turns into an autobiographical novel entitled And If I'd Screamed: almost against its author's will, the manuscript reveals an enormously sordid but true childhood situation - how the narrator was an incestuous sexual toy used by all three of her brothers, and a smattering of male cousins as well. And, as the novel-within-the-novel lets this secret loose at last, the narrator feels she can finally confront her liberal and educated parents with the fact of the sexual abuse, plus the accusation that they knew about it all along and did nothing to stop it. This trauma, brought out red as a hot coal from the middle of the narrator's psyche, is unexpected, quite legitimately shocking; it colors everything that follows)