Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope

by Amanda Nguyen

In America’s criminal justice system, survivors become background characters to a story that is actually about us—our lives, our bodies, our dignity. The battleground for violence against women’s bodies can’t even pass the Bechdel test. That’s just how the system works. Victims are erased from their own narratives.

Your rage is like so many women’s: calm on the outside, a hurricane within.”

“Your saddest memories aren’t of pain,” she explains. “They’re of grief, the potential of happiness that cannot be.”