Status Updates From Trauma Plot: A Life

2/2 “…sweeping the fragments into a dustpan. The shards were the book, violent and strange. I dance among them” (xxx).

1/2 “Each [rape] I write in a different form. I refuse to reconcile them. I leap over time, and flit between styles, through multiple narrative positions in relation to my ‘self.’ My rapes aren’t unspeakable, but my speech shifts, it metamorphoses, it refracts. I wanted my account to wrestle with rape’s dis-ordering, how it turned my cells against themselves. I was undone, and I couldn’t fix it…

2/2 “…memoir, Ford writes that it ‘didn’t feel like I hadn’t been heard. It felt like I had been believed, [and] the response was a proverbial shrug.’ Like Anita Hill before her, testifying ‘hadn’t solved the problem…I couldn’t fix the fundamental injustice of that’” (xxviii).

1/ “Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court seemed to me the first meaningful death knell of #MeToo. Not because Ford’s legitimacy as a witness of her own life was well-challenged—it was obvious she was credible; even Trump yielded the point—but because it served to show no one much cared if a woman was violated or not, particularly if the perp was a man turning any special wheel of power. In her…

3/3 “…better at managing lately” (xxii-xxiii).

2/ “…but my sense that I was an aberration is what made me so sure I’d deserved all that had happened. Shame particularizes. Shame isolates. Now I no longer see trauma as exceptional, which is a strange thing to confess at the beginning of a memoir about it. But if I am singular in some way, it’s not through my endurance of violence. Rape seems to me only a trouble I am writing about, a trouble I’ve been…

1/ “Nevertheless, [#MeToo’s] revelations exposed the immensity of the problem: sexual violence was everywhere, and all the time. This knowledge freed me from ego, I guess, and something I needed in that moment was to surrender centrality. Until I was able to look outside the fractured self, I would never refashion its what a relief to find I wasn’t special. And how devastating. It’s banal to say, but to my…