Notes on a courageous writer

Lacy Crawford. 

She published a memoir in July, Notes on a Silencing.  So much is strong as steel in this book.  Not the least of which is the guts it took to write it.  But no mistaking, this book is a font of startlingly good writing.

It takes one event in the author's life, a sexual assault when she was fifteen, and weaves the story masterfully around all its repercussions, of which there are many.  There are slashing emotional wounds bestowed upon this girl.  One thing stands out: she was alone.  In every way.

Notes on a Silencing takes place, mostly, at St. Paul's School, a storied, elite prep school for boys and girls in New Hampshire.  

Crawford was 15 when she got a phone call one night from a boy at school she hardly knew.  He was distraught.  He said something had happened with his mother.  Would she please come to help.  She did.  That boy and another boy brutally raped her orally. She didn't know it then, but one result of this crime was she contracted herpes.

The book is the story of what happened before and after that night.  It's ugly and will shake you.

There is not a single drop of self-pity in this book.  You, the reader, will supply the pity, the outrage, the anger and the sorrow as you read this story.  There is much cowardice here, not from the author, but from St. Paul's and its administration and teachers.  Not to mention lying and, as the title suggests, attempts by the school to silence Crawford.

Lacy Crawford is able to describe the machinations, pettiness and outright cruelty that flows through prep school dorms better than anyone I've ever read.  Having attended one of these so-called elite prep schools for five years myself as a boarding student, I can tell you that she has perfect pitch when it comes to describing the particular form of cruelty that arises from youth who come from money and privilege.

The humiliations and emotional agonies she experiences many.  You should read her story.  She tells it so well.  

The courage?  After having told her story many times to people who doubt her and even—of course!—accuse her of being at fault, Crawford decides, nearly thirty years after the events, to write about them in a book.  She doesn't hold back on—anything. She's married now, happily, and has two small sons.  On day, they will read her book.   She know this, of course.  Yet, she proceeds. It's a beautifully written book and a humbling experience to read it.