This paper, focusing on childhood abuse and its impact upon the injured child, will attempt to investigate the “family politics” in Allison’s autobiographical novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, particularly the relationships between the narrator daughter and her stepfather and mother, by using empirical psychological theories: Heinz Ko-hut’s notions of self psychology and narcissism and Judith Herman’s observations on trauma survivals. To the author, the writing of Bastard is a movement through the history of childhood abuse toward the possibility of choice—Allison’s choice to strike back at her abuser. The desire for revenge is so urgent and compelling that the writer puts her scenes of violent abuse right at or near the beginning of the novel. The delib-erately graphic description of the abuse scenes functions then, by shocking the reader, as a way of seeking revenge: the battleground is now shifted from a girl’s abused body to the body of a text that cries out with pain, cries out for justice. The text has now the power to punish the abuser by laying bare his crime; the text becomes a court of law, the readers judges. Thus in effect Allison, through her girl narrator’s story, is reversing or rather inverting herself, turning her own hidden scar inside out and into the broad light of day, displaying the cruel reality of her suffering in full force and for all to see. The writing itself has sprung forth from this terrible inner wound; as the wound can never fully heal the writing must keep flowing out of it.