I Was Anastasia

by Ariel Lawhon

There is nothing artistic about rape. Taking a woman by force makes a man no better than the rooster in Tobolsk. It simply makes him an animal.

It was early November and I was sitting at my desk. I know this because the leaves were falling outside, and my husband had started a fire in the fireplace before leaving for work. The kids were at school and I was all alone in a quiet house. I’d researched and written about seventy-five percent of I WAS ANASTASIA. I felt like I had a good grip on what was going to happen in the story. I knew how it would end and what I would have to do over the next weeks and months to finish the book. And then… …and then I stumbled across a detail in my research material (confirmed in a second source) about a sexual assault. I hadn’t planned to write that. I didn’t want to write that. But it happened and to pretend it didn’t would be wrong. So, I wrote the scene from the perspective of a young woman trying to make sense of such horror. She frames it in the only way she—and I—could. And if, like either of us, you’ve ever spent time on a farm you’ll understand the imagery. I didn’t eat lunch that day. I just sat at my desk and cried my way through.