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.
