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80
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
79/100Critics
80/100Scholars
Author:
Lacy Crawford
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Date:
July 7, 2020
A novelistâs account of how she has struggled to come to terms with a traumatic sexual assault that the elite boarding school she attended actively tried to cover up.
What The Reviewers Say
Notes on a Silencing is a purposefully named, brutal and brilliant retort to the asinine question of 'Why now?'.
... 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.
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.
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.
