Thelma Barley, the narrator of Toronto writer Camilla Gibb’s first novel, Mouthing the Words, survives childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father and the emotional bludgeoning of her vain, capricious mother to become a feminist lawyer. Thelma is the first-born of Douglas, son of an impoverished English peacock farmer, and Corinna, a well-intentioned but daft mother who was educated at a Swiss finishing school. Gibb evokes an emotionally clenched, eccentric provenance for her characters, one in which frustration and rage incubate a family narrative of savage cruelty.

Thelma’s immediate family, which includes a brother, emigrates to Canada where the abuse escalates. Gibb moves quickly through a welter of cause and effect to show Thelma’s attempts to make sense of the delirium surrounding and, inevitably, inhabiting her. Thelma becomes anorexic, entertains imaginary friends who appear to be a function of her fractured psyche, suffers breakdowns and hospitalizations, and attempts suicide at Oxford where she has won a scholarship for an advanced degree in law. Through much of the novel Gibb uses the woozy, self-absorbed language and logic of personal journalese and therapy sessions to telegraph Thelma’s self-devouring, explosive anger and castigating humour as she braves a life-and-death struggle to take back her own life. Details and characters – Thelma’s brother, for instance – are frequently picked up and dropped, buried under plangent repetitions that choke the narrative’s focus.

Nevertheless Gibb, who holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Oxford, traces the telltale, corrosive tropes of the abused with frankness. She writes movingly about the shadow world of the psychiatrized, the search for positive role models and friends, the bewildered, tragi-comic effort to learn the social codes through which ordinary life is conducted, and the defiance and resilience of one woman determined to survive.