India, Feb. 14 -- 1You begin Sad Tiger, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, by creating a portrait of an abuser, your stepfather. What shaped this decision? One of the reasons is the impact the trauma had on me. I was abused by a powerful figure, and I was forced to put myself in his shoes all the time. One of the strategies of his domination over me as a child, as a victim, was to make me consider him more important than me. I think it's very common in people who have been victims to think a lot about the abuser. It's also strange, the language we use. I've seen something I can call evil, but I don't really know how and what to call this. I always wondered what happened to [my stepfather]? What was happening in his brain when he started doing this? How can that happen? Would I be able to become an abuser myself? I was thinking of all these questions. When the book begins, the figure of the abuser in my head is big, and I'm trying to come to terms with this, and that's why the title is Sad Tiger. Because this tiger, which is ferocious in the beginning, is getting deconstructed as the story progresses. It's a strange narrative because there's an undercurrent here. I'm trying to build this space for myself and for my voice, but also for the reader. 2Your mother told you to look at the "good side" of your stepfather. This is eerily similar to the denial one can sense in the Alice Munro expose. It's complex, I know, and that's what I'm trying to show: that it's impossible to keep everything together, fully knowing the nature of the abuser. There's a man you know, who's your friend, whom you think is a good person. It can be a colleague or your father or whoever, but when you learn he did something to someone, how do these two personalities of the same person, these aspects, come together? Processing this can sometimes drive you to the edge, which is what I think happened to my mother. For her, my stepfather was just an ordinary person. He couldn't have done this. So, maybe everything she had heard was a lie. Or the other way around, maybe my stepfather is a monster. If you look beyond the facade of a person, you tend to see that both extremes are wrong. The truth lies somewhere in-between. Abusers are regular people. They are among us. It's confusing, but I think they're able to commit a crime because they're able to project their goodness at the same time. We mustn't forget that a child never consents. Now, try to imagine how much time and rumination is involved in acknowledging this bare fact. After all these years of rumination, I wasn't trying to find answers. 3Is that why you've used this structure and created a portrait of the abuser to tell your story? Yes, it's a construction. Fiction is construction, too. We're never going to have direct access to the truth. I don't know much about India, but in the places I've lived, societal conditions aren't made for children to be in a good, safe place. To protect our children, we need to build a space for them to express themselves, and hear them....