Know My Name tells us not just what it was like to live through these major cultural flash-points, but also all the moments in-between...In how much she reveals of herself, Miller provides one of the most moving and humanizing depictions of sexual assault I have ever read ... [Miller] is raw and exposed, and her openness feels like a revelation. At times it’s like reading the diary of a friend. We get to know her through her sense of humor and her artistic vision, and even in the book’s darkest moments, I came to love the way the world looked through her eyes ... features the kind of intimate, coming-of-age storytelling that you don’t find in a typical story about a crime and its aftermath ... Since #MeToo, we talk often about the tangible costs of trauma — financial costs, for example, or a PTSD diagnosis — but it’s rare that we talk about the way it robs women of their own bodies, the way it takes away the freedom to be sexual, and how that is just as much of a loss ... an excruciating account of the myriad indignities and inconveniences it took to arrive at such an unsatisfying result ... In giving us the gift of knowing her, Miller has written a singular testament to the human cost of sexual violence, and a powerful reminder of why we fight.
Know My Name is an act of reclamation. On every page, Miller unflattens herself, returning from Victim or Emily Doe to Chanel, a beloved daughter and sister, whose mother emigrated from China to learn English and become a writer and whose father is a therapist; a girl who was so shy that, in an elementary school play about a safari, she played the grass ... Know My Name is one woman’s story. But it’s also every woman’s story — the story of a world whose institutions are built to protect men; a world where sexual objectification is ubiquitous and the threat of sexual violence is constant ... Miller is a poetic, precise writer with an eye for detail ... Know My Name is a beautifully written, powerful, important story. It marks the debut of a gifted young writer. It deserves a wide audience — but it especially deserves to be read by the next generation of young men, the could-be Brocks and Elliots, who have grown up seeing women’s bodies as property to plunder, who believe that sex is their right ... No matter who reads Know My Name, Miller’s words are purpose. They are maps. And she is a treasure who has prevailed.
... a devastating, immersive memoir of [Miller's] sexual assault and its aftermath. We live with Miller minute by minute, thinking and feeling with her. At points, particularly during the account of her testimony, it is hard to read it and breathe at the same time ... Miller is an extraordinary writer: plain, precise and moving. The memoir's sharpest moments focus on her family and their grief over her attack.
... the product of rigorous writerly attention ... If Know My Name had been shaped in these slicker forms—a corrective, a tell-all—readers sympathetic to Miller would have readily received her rage, whatever her tone. But Miller situates victimhood as a conduit to expertise, and trauma as a mode of human insight ... Miller is a gifted storyteller who establishes her authority by stacking details, setting scenes ... she observes her own ordeal by adopting the stance of a reporter, a media critic, and an activism-minded theorist. She is heartbreakingly resourceful, marshalling her subjectivity as evidence of a system set up to protect the potential of a boy like Turner ... contains a forceful critique of the complicity of liberal institutions like Stanford, which seem more afraid of upsetting sensibilities than they are concerned with doing right by survivors like Miller ... Miller’s writing début may have been precipitated by her assault, but the final work devitalizes its horrific beginnings. No narrative is as persuasive as Miller’s. There is no more self-effacing sobriety, no more conclusions plastering confusion and fury. Know her name, know her voice.
When it was published in 2016, Miller’s letter stunned readers with the clarity of her voice, acuity of her rage and expansiveness of her empathy towards those in need of support. Her story offered other victims a shared language; Miller recalls receiving thousands of supportive letters from women recounting their own stories. Her memoir has this same mix of the intimate with the communal, placing her own pain against a backdrop of shared suffering ... Against a system that leads victims to recede into their own spheres of private suffering, Know My Name creates a space where this pain can sit and receive support from others ... In a world that asks too many survivors to keep their experiences to themselves and shrink their suffering to preserve someone else’s potential, Know My Name stands unapologetically large, asking others to reckon with its author’s dazzling, undiminishable presence. To read it, in spite of everything, inspires hope.
... difficult to read in part because it is beautiful to read. Its lush words are accompanied by the specter of all that might have been—the shadow of the path that was, without Miller’s say, so violently bent in another direction. Miller’s talents might have found expression in a form other than a book about the effects of sexual violence. When trauma is transformed into art, there will always be a paradox at play: The art’s existence is beautiful. But it shouldn’t have to exist at all ... But Know My Name is insistent in its very presence. It forces readers not only to look and listen, but also to really see, to really hear—to meet Miller on her terms, in the context of the story she is telling about herself. In that, it is bracing. We are not used to hearing—to knowing—the details of sexual violence. We are not used to experiencing the daily facts of trauma through the extreme subjectivity of a memoir ... Know My Name’s power resides, in large part, in its details—details that could belong only to Chanel Miller, that could serve only her story.
... unputdownable ... Miller’s writing shines as she recounts her initial efforts to find a corner of the world where she could disappear, moving from Providence to Philadelphia, all the while in a fog, feeling present but detached ... A much-needed memoir giving voice to those who must be heard. Miller’s writing stands apart.
... a painstakingly detailed look at orthodoxies around gender we've failed to question, a society that still doesn't comprehend the impact of sexual violence and a culture that acquiesces to the outrageous notion women are responsible for their own safety, sending the message that when it comes to sexual violence, men aren't responsible for much at all ... Miller's memoir is an intensely specific account of the impact those 20 minutes had on her life, and on the lives of those closest to her. She writes exquisitely of her pain, makes us feel every fragment of it, but also expounds on the kindnesses that nourished her spirit along the way.
There has been a recent and welcome surge of books that give voice to people who were once pushed to the margins, held in obscurity, muffled in silence, and Miller’s memoir is a welcome addition to this new canon ... In a time when the memoir genre is criticized as dispensable and navel-gazing, Miller reminds us that our stories are worth telling, that the names and the lives attached to those names matter.
Miller draws a clear-eyed portrait of how difficult it is for a rape victim to get justice, and how the process serves as its own kind of re-victimization ... more powerful still is Miller’s ability to coalesce her experience of what came after the assault — the long court case, the intense media coverage, the light sentence — into something larger ... a gut-punch, and in the end, somehow, also blessedly hopeful.
Miller drags the reader through her hell as she lived it ... The time-consuming legal process is emotionally battering, and Miller’s pain emanates off the page ... This memoir is a heavy one. But one hopes it will educate people about the terrorism of sexual violence and bring comfort to those still suffering in silence.
Miller writes in a methodical, steely, gripping way about her trial. I knew every major turn of the case beforehand, and still found myself shaking a little, heart quickening as cross-questioning was endured, verdicts given, a sentence passed. But it’s everything in the surrounding chapters—her family and boyfriend, her childhood memories and bruising internal monologue, her stalled dreams and gradual reawakening—that adds depth to the trial. After being gifted such intimate knowledge of a person, it’s unnerving to see the ways she both does and doesn’t recognize herself in that courtroom ... another surprising source of eloquence is Miller’s writing, which often has the vivid, off-kilter feeling of poetry ... All the small conversations and reflections in Know My Name combine to offer a full picture of a struggling human, someone struggling with her new understanding of what it can mean to be human ... Chanel Miller’s battles, her joy, her voice, are hers, not stand-ins for anyone else’s. That’s precisely why so many readers will identify with her.
Miller has an almost inconceivable well of perspective on her experience ... Miller’s memoir also articulates the way that sexual assault has ripple effects far beyond just the victim ... a memoir, yes, but it’s also a heart-wrenchingly honest manifesto for any survivor.
... extraordinary, no-holds-barred ... It is fair to say that, until now, no author has addressed the issue of sexual assault so much on her own terms, and in such a personal and powerful way ... an of-the-moment as well as timeless story, vividly told, that should be required reading ... not only introduces a new literary voice, it tells a riveting story that will transform many lives.
... a searing examination of the criminal justice system and the devastating ways in which sexual assault victims are treated in the United States ... In its rare honesty and its small details, Know My Name is both an open wound and a salve, a quiet cry and the loudest scream ... is more than an indictment, though it is a successful and moving one. It is also an outstretched hand, inviting you to fight alongside her.
Miller brings her story alive with so many compelling details that we feel every electric twitch and nuance of her tale ... At times, the tension is almost unbearable ... There are times when the campaigning voice in the book feels a little too loud...But she has told her story with such visceral power, and such quiet, deadly anger, that she doesn’t need to spell it out ... This is a minor flaw in a searing, beautiful book by a supremely talented writer. Know My Name? If you don’t now, you probably soon will.
... reads like a preemptive strike against those who would discredit [Miller] ... As blurry and painful as Miller’s story of assault is, she still manages to wrest control of her narrative. Her prose is relatable and effective; her comedic gift, honed at stand-up shows in Philadelphia after the assault, is clear even within a dark tale; her use of metaphor is crystal clear ... None of that feels quite like the point, though. If Miller weren’t such a skilled writer, would that be a mark against her? Make her less credible, less worthy of our attention? Do survivors like Miller deserve to have sympathy parceled out to them based on how fluidly they relate their trauma? ... To tell her story at all is enough, first in her victim impact statement and now in Know My Name; the fact that Miller tells it beautifully, caring enough for her reader to spin golden sentences from her pain, is a gift on top of a gift. It almost feels like more than we deserve, like we’re taking something from her that we have no business asking for, but that doesn’t seem to be how Miller feels about it. "It feels better when the story is outside myself,” she writes in a notebook at one point following the assault, and as the outpouring of support from survivors after her BuzzFeed piece proved, others feel better when she tells her story, too.
... harrowing ... Miller takes back her identity in a chilling and ultimately triumphant memoir that reveals how she has moved on—from victim to writer and activist ... Miller flips that script, assembling a collage of court transcripts, personal history, and dawning fierceness ... evokes a woman whose spirit hasn’t been broken—a study in what it means to strike back, not in revenge, but in reclamation.
