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A review by kelseywaters
Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir by Lacy Crawford
5.0
This memoir was incredibly powerful. It opens with the scene of Lacy’s sexual assault, but told from an outsider’s perspective. As you read through her years at St Paul’s, you understand the assault in so many different layers: what led up to it, the aftermath, the silencing, the long term effects.
It is brutal and painful, and feels so necessary that it be read.
I feel wildly grateful to all the survivors who continue to bear witness and fight the complete bullshit of a system that protects everyone but them. The amount of educating and pushing through that survivors have had to do continues to make things just a little safer for others, but the trauma and sacrifice they’ve experienced is too much for me to ever comprehend.
A couple excerpts:
“It’s so simple, what happened at St Paul’s. It happens all the time.
First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur “slut” carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as it’s true intent. That the opposite of “slut” is not virtue but voice.” (P381-382).
“Here is the most generous gift of speaking up, of ‘coming forward,’ as they say, and it’s a wildly gracious turn: that my story might cause others not to hear my voice but might allow them, perhaps for the first time, to hear their own.” (P 406).
“You are a reliable witness to your own experience.” Lacy Crawford on “The Courageously.u podcast with Tara Bixby”
It is brutal and painful, and feels so necessary that it be read.
I feel wildly grateful to all the survivors who continue to bear witness and fight the complete bullshit of a system that protects everyone but them. The amount of educating and pushing through that survivors have had to do continues to make things just a little safer for others, but the trauma and sacrifice they’ve experienced is too much for me to ever comprehend.
A couple excerpts:
“It’s so simple, what happened at St Paul’s. It happens all the time.
First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur “slut” carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as it’s true intent. That the opposite of “slut” is not virtue but voice.” (P381-382).
“Here is the most generous gift of speaking up, of ‘coming forward,’ as they say, and it’s a wildly gracious turn: that my story might cause others not to hear my voice but might allow them, perhaps for the first time, to hear their own.” (P 406).
“You are a reliable witness to your own experience.” Lacy Crawford on “The Courageously.u podcast with Tara Bixby”