Gabriel Tallent knows his book 'My Absolute Darling' is painful to read. For him, that's the point.

Author Gabriel Tallent has a theory about literature: "I think good books ask us to be courageous readers."

It's an apt suggestion, especially with his debut novel My Absolute Darling.

The book follows a 14-year-old girl, Turtle Alveston, who lives in northern California as she struggles to escape the abuse she suffers at the hand of her father. But if there is one characteristic about My Absolute Darling that stands out, it's the novel's unflinching, often painful-to-read look at violence, which often requires courage from the reader as the book confronts such scenes head on. And for Tallent, that's the point.

“I wanted to present a vision of violence that is utterly unconscionable,” Tallent explains of his book. “There is a way in which I think often times the interiority and the experience of violence is not depicted [in stories]. Survivors are shown as bodies, as beautiful cast away creatures. In so many stories, these characters are peripheral — the reason male characters have their emotional development. But when you begin to take seriously what that interiority and what that experience [of violence] is like, it presents such a vision of skin crawlingly unbearable awfulness, that I wanted it to seem utterly un-endurable that this should happen anywhere in the world. And I think sometimes when we pull those punches, that reality doesn’t sink in for people.”

And while Tallent acknowledges that those scenes can be hard to read, just as they were hard for him to write, he says that he felt a responsibility to tell an unfiltered look at abuse, as a way to honor the reality of survivors.

"I felt seriously the urgency of that project [to write this book]. I have known people who have grown up hard. And I couldn’t say, 'Look, your experience is too hard to ever be a book, you can’t be a protagonist. People will only ever turn away from you in shame.'"

Join us this week on the MashReads Podcast in the episode above, as we chat with Gabriel Tallent himself about his new book My Absolute Darling.

Then as always, we end the show with recommendations:

• Gabriel recommends Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

• Aliza recommends Ronan Farrow’s piece in the New Yorker about the Harvey Weinstein allegations "For Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: "Harvey Weinstein's Accusers Tell Their Stories." "It didn’t break the news about the Weinstein abuses but it really delved into what was going on ... My recommendation is to listen to women, especially when they tell you about trauma. And read Ronan's New Yorker piece."

• Peter recommends Netflix's new show American Vandal. “Even though I do have faults with the plot as it’s told, it is an extremely well done fictionalized mystery, with some fantastic acting from some very young actors.” Peter also recommends watching the french horror movie Raw in October for Halloween. You can see Peter's full list of Netflix hidden-gem horror movie recommendations here.

• MJ recommends reading 'Call Me By Your Name' by André Aciman. “Boy is that a beautifully written novel.” He also recommends all of the Armie Hammer dance club mashups that riff of of the movie 'Call Me By Your Name', especially this one of Armie dancing to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut To The Feeling.”

Next week we're reading John Green's new novel Turtles All The Way Down. We hope you'll join us! And don't forget to follow MashReads on Facebook and Twitter for the latest, greatest book news.

If you have experienced sexual abuse, call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access the 24-7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.