Paratexts, protection, and personal truths: The limits of authorial redaction

Writing a novel that addresses one of the most stigmatised and silenced taboos – child sexual abuse – involves the author performing in a deeply affective space, where emotions function as essential components of the creative process. Complicating this writing act is what Margaret Atwood calls “a burden of anxieties”, noting that writing is “so much like evidence – like something that can be used against you later” (2002, p. 48). While writing The (Redacted novel title) , I was acutely aware that my subject matter could be perceived as evidence of my own childhood sexual abuse – something I was not ready to disclose. To protect myself, I actively erased any personal identification with the novel’s protagonist, redacting my presence from the paratext. This academic disembodiment offered psychological refuge in public discourse, allowing me to maintain a sense of detachment. At the time, I believed this strategy kept my psychosocial world intact. Years later, while supervising a forensic psychologist’s PhD on intrafamilial child sexual abuse, her exegesis generated an unexpected personal epiphany: my self-redaction was not a refuge, but a profound denial of my own experiences and their impact on my identity. This article reflects on that realisation, contributing to creative writing scholarship by exploring the challenges writer-academics face when engaging with deeply personal and socially fraught subjects. By examining the implications of self-redaction, it highlights the complex interplay between personal history, creative expression and academic inquiry.