Funny Peculiar (2008) by Constance McCullagh, published by  Brandon.

The abused child is nearly always a silenced child. Where the abuse has come from an attachment figure the silence can even corrode the voice of the adult. This makes the whole field of literature by survivors so extremely important. Its mere existence is a flag in a personal, cultural and political struggle.

Survivors' literature falls into a complex number of categories, but I consider there are three major ones. The largest category probably consists of writers who happen to be survivors but might never reveal it, and pour their truth into fictionalized containers. The next largest category consists of the brave individuals (including celebrities) who are not great writers but who honestly bear witness to what their child self has suffered. Here the writing is a crucial testimony but would not find a place in a literary collection.

Funny Peculiar, on the other hand, comes from the smallest category of survivor literature. It is written by a survivor who openly declares herself to be a survivor and provides an account of her childhood from four to fourteen, but it is also an extremely well-written first book. It is literature.

The quotation at the front of the book, from Audre Lorde's A Litany for Survival, is ‘So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive’. Here we have an autobiography by a survivor of child abuse who makes it clear she refuses to be defined or limited by that experience. There is nothing gratuitous or sentimental in the writing. The author has not needed the reader to be her therapeutic container. Indeed, she has processed her experience so profoundly that we are invited into a life with genuine humour, feistiness, and courage as well as pain, shame, and humiliation.

Constance McCullagh (not her real name) is Irish and provides us with a rare historic account of Protestant childhood life during the Troubles. There are many accounts of Catholic victimisation, both domestically and culturally, but