Notes on a Silencing is a purposefully named, brutal and brilliant retort to the asinine question of 'Why now?' ... Crawford’s writing is astonishing. There are lines that keen ... The story is crafted with the precision of a thriller, with revelations that sent me reeling. Notes on a Silencing also left me with a deep heartache and little relief, though Crawford offers up moments of reprieve where she can ... If you are looking for a story about triumph, about justice, you will not find it here. But perhaps that is a necessary thing.
... memoirs like Lacy Crawford’s Notes on a Silencing remind us how little progress has been made. The problem persists, doggedly, but Crawford’s revelations about the insidious and systematic ways stories of assault are buried left me shaken, moved, angry. By the end, we all understand how rarely women are granted any kind of justice. The book, which chronicles her assault at a boarding school, is a reminder of how adults willingly and knowingly serve up children to trauma in exchange for maintaining their reputations ... not an unfamiliar story. But in its relentless exploration of power and hubris, it is a story that reminds us (because we apparently need reminding again and again) that women are still impotent against institutions and the men who run them ... She raises and then doesn’t explore the implications of race when we learn one of the young men who assaulted her was a person of color. It is the right decision. She neither contextualizes nor excuses his violence against her. He was, in his own way, a victim. But he is not her victim ... The book is a riveting, damning exploration of how a single moment can reshape an entire life. Crawford was victimized, but she does not remain locked in that room. She revisits the moment only when she can discover something new about it, some way to hold accountable those who refuse to take responsibility: the school, the young men, the lawyers and detectives, and indeed the very culture that creates these structures ... Crawford does what the best memoirists do: She reaches beyond a single story. She writes in what is arguably the post-#MeToo era. An era in which we tried, for a brief time, to have our stories change our institutions ... The book is a stunning, audacious attempt to reassert power over her own story.
Notes on a Silencing is a horror story, depicting a prep school as a hunting ground. Crawford writes with clarity and rueful authority. She’s detailed and specific, and corroborates all her memories with medical and police reports and other written records. Notes on a Silencing is as much a work of meticulous investigative journalism as it is a memoir; Crawford writes like someone who’s used to not being believed ... This experience was so damaging to her developing brain that for years it was difficult for her to comprehend all its repercussions; at last she has pieced together an intricate story as an artist might fashion a beautiful mosaic out of shards ... In telling her story 30 years later, she must sing alone, but she does so with a strong, clear, unimpeachable voice.
Crawford, a novelist, uses her storytelling skill to illuminate the myriad ways female students were taught that their desires and bodies were less valuable than—even subject to—those of their male peers ... Crawford’s detailed account of her assault and its aftermath relies on an indelible memory as well as careful research. Medical reports and other documentation help her piece together the school’s reaction when she revisits it decades later, after other victims began holding the school accountable ... a ghastly account, beautifully told, of a teenage girl learning that people in power often value reputation above all else.
In Notes on a Silencing, Crawford lays bare the impact of violence on identity. She navigates her trauma surgically by trying to establish the parameters of its lexicon — was it rape, assault, aggravated assault, aggravated felonious assault, intercourse, nonconsensual sex? — then interrogating the terms in which to define herself, as so many sexual assault victims do ... The book underscores the complicated and oppressive machinations of a young girl’s sexuality ... The rigor and elegance of Crawford’s sentences, even while writing about such painful things, lifts this memoir into literary heights ... Crawford is forcing the unchecked power of an elite institution to answer for their violations and the victims they shoved into silent hallways of despair.
Crawford explores the effects of sexual assault with visceral force and honesty ... While the memoir itself is beautifully written, the book also provides a very real corrective to the oversimplification we often make when we think that telling a story, bringing a case to trial, or 'winning' in some public way is enough to restore what has been taken from a survivor of sexual assault ... This brave, brilliant memoir reveals the multifaceted effects of trauma on a survivor’s life, the damage done by some of the ways in which disclosures happen, and the power of finding a voice on one’s own terms, if and when one feels supported, sustained, and able to speak.
Acknowledging that a storyteller’s choices in themselves tell a story, [Crawford] gives a studied, vulnerable, and maddening account of her near-undoing and the school’s absolute obstruction of the truth. She melds her personae as a teenage girl, a survivor, and a skilled narrator, relating what she understood as she understood it, while also revealing her story’s upsetting course. Crawford’s meditation on the effects of silence, shame, and belief, and the antidotes she had to invent for herself, will add to evolving discussions of sexual assault and power.
...propulsive ... The facts carry readers along as they would in a crime novel, with clinical details that force observers to imagine the motives and emotions of the perpetrators and victim ... By toggling between the timelines before and after the book's central event, she conveys the universal experience of survivors--the divide between the person she was and the person she becomes afterward ... precise, lucid.
Trenchant in its observations about the unspoken—and often criminal—double standards that adhere in elite spaces, Crawford’s courageous book is a bracing reminder of the dangers inherent in unchecked patriarchal power ... A powerful, topical, and incisive memoir.
Mindfully, Crawford details her experience of being sexually violated and the humiliation that followed her until she graduated ... Crawford recognizes her story can sadly appear ordinary—another girl assaulted at one of the elite private schools in America. But it is her ability to tell the story with courage that discharges the power she felt for years was greater than herself.
... devastating ... Crawford carefully exposes the rotten underbelly of the school, whose administrators never reported her assault to police ... Crawford’s is a stirring memoir of sexual assault and its aftermath.
