Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

Name: Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir
Price: 11.26 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Lacy Crawford
ISBN: 9780316491556

When the elite St. Paul's School came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she'd put behind her the assault she'd suffered decades before. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note. With her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories — and learned that police had uncovered astonishing proof of an institutional silencing years before, and that unnamed powers were still trying to block her case. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced hadn't been the imagined effects of trauma, after all: these were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child.

This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry into the ways gender, privilege, and power shaped her experience as a girl at the gates of America's elite. Her investigation looks beyond crucibles of power like St. Paul's, whose reckoning is still to come. And it runs deep into the channels of shame and guilt, witness and silencing, that dictate who can speak and who is heard in American society. An insightful, mature, beautifully written memoir, Notes on a Silencing is an arresting coming-of-age story that wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy?