I feel the need to remind you that, while this is a book about talking about rape, it’s important not to get so comfortable and conversational that we forget something: rape is staggeringly horrible. Most of us survive, and, if we’re lucky, get to appreciate the sounds of birds hurling crockery at each other in the trees of a summer morning. But, no matter how much we talk about it, it is in fact staggeringly, almost incomprehensibly awful. Like war, childbirth and other traumas, it’s almost impossible to explain if you haven’t been through it.
