When you imagine a survivor of Catholic clergy sexual abuse, who do you picture? Maybe a child or a young teenager; probably from your own country; almost certainly a layperson. In Precarious, Patrick Goujon, a French Jesuit priest, grapples with his recent realization that he, too, is a survivor.

In many respects, Precarious reminds me of some of the best survivor memoirs that I have read. It is a painful but compelling narrative; it describes the lifelong devastation of clergy sexual abuse; it offers brief theological reflections; and it is unwavering in its critique of the way that French bishops prioritized abusers over children. In other important ways, however, Precarious is also distinctive. Rather than focusing on the abuse and its immediate aftermath, the book dwells in the recent past, focusing mostly on 2017–2021, the four years during which Goujon suffered immense physical pain, sought medical treatment, suddenly remembered his abuse, confronted the facts, and gradually decided to seek justice.

Goujon artfully differentiates between—as he understands it—the Catholicism that harmed him and the more enduring faith that now helps him confront that abuse. His transformation from victim to survivor, Goujon tells us, comes from regaining his capacity to speak, a power that he attributes to the biblical wisdom in Psalms, Job, and Isaiah. Goujon sees the hand of God at work even in the timing of his own recovery: he comes out as a survivor on Easter Sunday, his body heals around Christmas, and his quest for justice fortuitously coincides with a once-in-a-generation moment of social reckoning—the collision of #MeToo and the French Independent Commission for Church Sexual Abuse (CIASE).

Most distinctively, Precarious is poetic. Goujon invites the reader into his process of resurrecting the abused child, combining the pastoralism of his vocation with the suffering of his survivorhood. At a particularly pivotal moment, for example, he writes:

Minimalist indeed. At times, the tenderness of Goujon’s prose almost threatens to melt away the intense anguish of clerical abuse.

Goujon is an academic, but Precarious does not attempt to be a work of scholarship. There are no footnotes, no scholarly conversations, not even a bibliography. But that does not mean there isn’t an intervention: by foregrounding the effort to reconcile his abuse and his faith, Goujon gives voice to an essential but usually overlooked aspect of Catholic survivor culture.

I have met dozens of Catholic survivors who, like Goujon, want desperately to share their stories of survival with us. Unfortunately, they are neither academics nor priests, and so university presses have demonstrated little interest in publishing their stories. That disinterest is a form of scholarly silence; and for many survivors, it has been deafening.

Our scholarly silencing of survivors has also had profound consequences for the fields of theology, Catholic studies, and religious studies. In the absence of polished and well-publicized survivor memoirs (like this one), we have come to rely primarily on institutional accounts of abuse—court records, news summaries, grand jury reports, clinical diagnoses, and even diocesan personnel files. What we need instead are more survivor stories—a goal for which Gerald McGlone SJ, who wrote the preface to this edition of Precarious, has also lobbied in recent years.

The relative lightness of Precarious makes it the perfect book for that family member, friend, or colleague who has expressed emotional exasperation about clergy abuse. It is neither long nor dense nor explicit nor triggering. For these reasons, it might also be a good fit for classrooms, where an undergraduate could be expected to read the entire book and then (more importantly) reflect deeply on the spiritual and physical suffering endured each day by survivors and their loved ones.