This contribution studies Dorothy Allison’s fictionalized incest narrative and explores how the traumatized child’s gaze and voice subvert social models of the child developed by social studies and feminist discourses, which promote the innocence, powerlessness and inferiority of children and victims of abuse. The child seizes the power of representation only to describe her reduction to silence by violence and incomprehension, yet the transcription of her thoughts makes up for her inability to speak, making the readers the only witnesses of abuse. To overcome terror, the girl invents gruesome stories, reveals her darker side and develops a disturbing sexual maturity in which trauma, suffering, pleasure and power mingle. However, fantasized agency fails to translate into resistance, the victim/abuser binary is not completely subverted, and the girl oscillates at the frontier between weakness and power, childish ignorance and adult maturity.