One night in October 1990, a young Lacy Crawford took a phone call at her dorm, surprised to hear an older boy pleading for her to come help him. Crawford was mystified but convinced there must be a reason, so she slipped across her boarding school campus and met the boy at his dorm window. When she climbed inside, she was confronted by the boy and his roommate, both stripped down to their underwear. That night would haunt her for decades to come.

In Notes on a Silencing, Crawford emphasizes that the sexual assault she experienced was not unusual. "It's so simple, what happened at St. Paul's. It happens all the time," she writes. "First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me." She describes St. Paul's as a lauded, sometimes lonely place where privileged teens were obsessed with their academic futures. (The author, when faced with the possibility of not returning for her senior year, pleaded with her parents: But what about Princeton?)

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. She'd had other sexual experiences as a teenager, a fact her teachers later used against her. When she began to experience physical ailments because of her assault, Crawford was certain it was a result of "what she had done." She was so wrecked by the experience that she saw herself, not the boys, as the one to blame.

Crawford's detailed account of her assault and its aftermath relies on an indelible memory as well as careful research. Medical reports and other documentation help her piece together the school's reaction when she revisits it decades later, after other victims began holding the school accountable.

Notes on a Silencing is a ghastly account, beautifully told, of a teenage girl learning that people in power often value reputation above all else.

Crawford (Hold Still) explores the effects of sexual assault with visceral force and honesty. After her private boarding school came under investigation for sexual assaults on campus, she came forward with her experience, which occurred decades earlier. Crawford works through complex theoretical issues related to gender, class, and privilege as they intersect with trauma, shame, and silencing. This provides a kind of bridge between issues raised by the #metoo movement and the nuances of sexual assault case investigations with its powerful emphasis on what Crawford describes as the "near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power." While the memoir itself is beautifully written, the book also provides a very real corrective to the oversimplification we often make when we think that telling a story, bringing a case to trial, or "winning" in some public way is enough to restore what has been taken from a survivor of sexual assault. VERDICT This brave, brilliant memoir reveals the multifaceted effects of trauma on a survivor's life, the damage done by some of the ways in which disclosures happen, and the power of finding a voice on one's own terms, if and when one feels supported, sustained, and able to speak.—Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

In this devastating memoir, Crawford (Early Decision) writes about being raped at age 15 by two 18-year-old male students at her elite New Hampshire boarding school and the attempt by school officials to cover it up. In 1990, Crawford was lured after curfew to a dorm room at St. Paul's School, where two students took turns forcing their penises into her mouth. (She contracted herpes as a result.) With measured prose, Crawford talks about the physical and emotional trauma she suffered, and about getting harassed by her assailants' friends in the days after the attack. When she finally told her mother what happened months later, school officials tried to shame and silence her: one administrator accused her of being promiscuous, and her college prospects were threatened. Crawford carefully exposes the rotten underbelly of the school, whose administrators never reported her assault to police and who, she learned after the school was investigated in 2018, had been orchestrating cover-ups of sexual violence and abuse for decades. "The slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent," she writes, eventually realizing that "the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice." Crawford's is a stirring memoir of sexual assault and its aftermath. (July)