We’re told that a woman who has been raped reports the atrocity in incoherent bits and pieces. To questions, she will often respond with contradictory answers. Images vivid one moment dissolve the next. Reality, shattered by trauma, becomes fluid, prismatic, kaleidoscopic, chaotic. When the bits and pieces begin to become coherent; when she starts shaping them into a story, any kind of story—the process of healing has begun.
