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.
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.
... 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.
