The propulsive memoir Notes on a Silencing opens in October 1990, when 15-year-old Lacy Crawford was sexually assaulted by two star athletes at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H.--described in the third person.
The facts carry readers along as they would in a crime novel, with clinical details that force observers to imagine the motives and emotions of the perpetrators and victim. Crawford then shifts to a first-person narrative. "What interests me," she writes, "is the near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power." What follows is an exploration of power in its countless iterations: the power of peers, the power of teachers, of administrators, of alumni, of parents--and the power that a diploma from a storied school can bequeath unto its graduates. What is that diploma worth, and what would you endure to get it?
From that initial chapter describing the assault during the fall of her junior year, Crawford flashes back to her first days on campus: fresh from Lake Forest, Ill., and newly exposed to the wealth and worldliness of her classmates. By toggling between the timelines before and after the book's central event, Crawford conveys the universal experience of survivors--the divide between the person she was and the person she becomes afterward--and builds the narrative to the epiphany that unlocks her silence. A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2020, Notes on a Silencing was also named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and a Best Book of the Year by Time, People and NPR. --Jennifer M. Brown, senior editor, Shelf Awareness