VictimOfSexualChildAbuse

Margaux Fragoso borrowed the title of her only published book, the memoir “Tiger, Tiger,” from William Blake. What divine presence, Blake wondered, could have created the tiger’s fiery eyes, burning bright? “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Ms. Fragoso never painted herself as an entirely innocent lamb. Nor did she suggest that the man she called Peter Curran, the 51-year-old pedophile who began abusing her when she was 7 and who maintained their relationship for 15 years, was an irredeemably ferocious tiger.

Rather, like the stanzas in Blake’s poem, her book raised more questions than it answered. Reviews ranged from livid indictments of what was dismissed as exploitive pornography to ringing endorsements of Ms. Fragoso’s bravery as a catharsis for herself, and a cautionary tale for children and their parents — a “Lolita” from Lolita’s perspective. It was listed by several publications as one of the notable books of the year.

Ms. Fragoso died on Friday in Mandeville, La., at 38. Her husband, Tom O’Connor, said the cause was ovarian cancer.

Her memoir was eight years in the making — she had previously published a number of poems and short stories — and when it was released in 2011 it was nothing if not controversial.

The book is set in Union City, N.J., where Ms. Fragoso lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her mentally ill mother, a former teacher at a day care center, and her abusive, alcoholic father, a jeweler. It begins at the end:

“I started writing this book the summer after the death of Peter Curran, whom I met when I was 7 and had a relationship with for 15 years, right up until he committed suicide at the age of 66.”

She wrote: “Our world had been permitted only by the secrecy surrounding it. Had you taken away our lies and codes and looks and symbols and haunts, you would have taken everything.”

She wrote that she introduced herself to Peter at a public pool, embraced him as a Peter Pan-like man-child and visited his home regularly, often chaperoned by her mother. They played games, including one called Tiger.

She graphically recalled their sexual encounters — so graphically and in such conversational detail that some reviewers questioned the memoir’s veracity and suggested that she should have written a fictionalized narrative instead. She said she had kept childhood journals, and jogged her memory by other means.

“Through her art she’s helped others who’ve been abused cope with the devastating complexity of that legacy,” Courtney Hodell, the former executive editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, her publisher, said in an interview on Tuesday.

Margaux Artemia Fragoso was born on April 15, 1979, in West New York, N.J., to Wilford Fragoso and the former Carol Brubaker.

She received a bachelor’s degree in English from New Jersey City University in 2002 and a master’s and a doctorate in English from Binghamton University in central New York.

Ms. Fragoso’s first marriage, to Steven McGowan, ended in divorce.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Alicia McGowan, from her first marriage.

Writing about “Tiger, Tiger” in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison wrote: “It’s testimony to Fragoso’s narrative abilities that she can render both her own and Curran’s points of view convincingly, as different — opposed — as they are.”

She continued: “‘Tiger, Tiger’ forces readers to experience Curran simultaneously as the object of a little girl’s love and fascination and as a calculating sex offender.”

Ms. Fragoso acknowledged that some readers were offended because she had not depicted Mr. Curran as a monster.

“I’m an artist, not a prosecutor,” she told the literary journal The Tottenville Review in 2011. “I’m not writing a manifesto; memoir is subjective. My feeling is that writers should give readers the freedom to think for themselves and form their own opinions.”