This month I am featuring Know My Name by Chanel Miller–a book that moved me to tears of joy and sadness. As someone who doesn’t cry super often, that is saying something. I was curious to read this book to know more about the Stanford rape case, but I was unprepared for what a gifted writer Chanel is, and how much her words would move me.
Chanel majored in literature, her mother is a prize-winning Chinese writer, and her father is a therapist, so she is particularly well suited to write a poignant and emotionally evocative account of her experiences. Her assailant was Brock Turner, the Stanford student-athlete and Olympic hopeful swimmer who got quite a bit of media attention after the assault in 2015.
I expected to be emotionally impacted by the trauma from the sexual assault, but I didn’t realize how much I would learn about how seriously the slow-turning wheel of justice and the process of facing the perpetrator in court contributes to an ongoing traumatic experience that can last years.
This is the type of book that would typically be accompanied by a “trigger warning” these days, because there is certainly triggering content in here, however, I really appreciate Chanel’s words on this subject and find her very quotable: “I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I’ve found that victims identify more with pain than platitudes.” There’s definitely heavy stuff in here, but it seems to me that you may be just as likely to find comfort as pain.
Whether or not you have personally experienced sexual violence, this is an important book if you want to learn more about the experience of being a victim/survivor, and if you want to gain a clearer understanding of how difficult it is to hold people accountable who commit this type of crime.
Know My Name is a great memoir, Chanel is an amazing writer, and I hope she finds other reasons to continue writing. If you don’t have the time to read her whole book, you can read the statement she wrote as Emily Doe that went viral on BuzzFeed here.
