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.

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.

Crawford explores the effects of sexual assault with visceral force and honesty.

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.

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.

Mindfully, Crawford details her experience of being sexually violated and the humiliation that followed her until she graduated.

... devastating.