A brave and honest account that illuminates the trauma suffered by rape survivors and their loved ones.
A debut memoir recounts the details of a harrowing, brutal rape and the author’s difficult path to recovery.
When Morehouse (a rape counselor at the time) returned to her town house in Edmonds, Washington, one night in May 1993, she had no idea that the next few hours would permanently change her life. She took her terrier-poodle mix, Puka, out for a walk, finished counting the proceeds from the coffee shop she owned, and climbed into bed. The next thing she remembered was lying face down on the floor of her bedroom, a man’s knee digging into her back, and his first words: “Shut up! We’re going to kill you!” Then she felt something sharp piercing her shoulder. What followed were hours of torment. The 21-year-old assailant pounded her head on the floor and against furniture, cut her with his knife, and raped her repeatedly while threatening to murder her. Finally, while he was looking for her cash, Morehouse was able to find her gun. Battered as she was, she took command of the situation, firing shots at the man later identified as Allan Ray Chesnutt and forcing him to lie on the floor until the police arrived. She had caught the serial rapist who had been plaguing the area. She was hailed as a “hero,” but this brought her no comfort: “Being labeled a hero was almost as hard as being labeled a victim—I just wanted my life back.” It would take years of therapy and several unhealthy relationships before she regained control of her life. In an account at once deeply personal and starkly specific, Morehouse relates each moment of the assault with riveting and frightening clarity. Readers will breathe a sigh of relief when the police arrive to find Chesnutt doubled over on the bathroom floor with the author holding her gun on him. But the heart of the book is yet to come. It rests in the many steps—and mistakes— of her lengthy journey back to self-confidence and self-reliance. It is chilling to watch her become involved in a series of emotionally abusive relationships. For her, at that stage, it was more terrifying to be alone: “Many times after the attack I believed there was nothing I could do to change things, I just allowed them to happen. I allowed myself to be victimized which kept me immersed in a victim mentality; helpless, needy and vulnerable.” Morehouse’s prose is fluid, but she has a proclivity for run-on sentences and a heavy, sometimes-bewildering use of commas where periods are needed: “My attacker lay face down on the powder room floor, his hand clutched his head, I saw this as my opportunity to make it to the door.” Still, once engaged in the compelling narrative, readers will likely forget the minor inconvenience of filling in their own full stops.
A brave and honest account that illuminates the trauma suffered by rape survivors and their loved ones.Pub Date: June 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5331-7904-3
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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