Notes on a silencing : a memoir

Title:

Author:

Crawford, Lacy, author.

Publication Information:

New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2020.

Edition:

First edition.

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

391 pages ; 25 cm

Summary:

Traces the author's healing journey after a traumatizing sexual assault at infamous St. Paul's boarding school, describing how she helped police uncover proof of the school's institutionalized mandate of silence.

Personal Subject:

Crawford, Lacy.

Subject Term:

Novelists, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

Sexual abuse victims -- United States -- Biography.

ISBN:

9780316491556

Document ID:

SD_ILS:4437479

Availability:

Library	Call Number	Format	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Abington Public Library	362.88 CRA	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Braintree Thayer Public Library	CRAWFORD	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Brockton Public Library	CRAWFORD L	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Canton Public Library	362.88 C	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Cohasset Paul Pratt Memorial Library	CRAWFORD	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Duxbury Free Library	362.883 CRA	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Hingham Public Library	B CRA	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Milton Public Library	B CRAWFORD, L. CRA	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Plymouth Public Library	B CRAWFORD	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Quincy Thomas Crane Library	364.153 CRAW	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Scituate Town Library	CRAWFORD CRA 2020	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Sharon Public Library	B CRAWFORD, LACY	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Stoughton Public Library	B CRAWFORD CRA	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Walpole Public Library	BIO CRAWFORD, LACY 2020	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Weymouth Tufts Library	CRAWFORD, L.	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
Searching... Whitman Public Library	BIO CRAWFORD	BOOK	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

A "powerful and scary and important and true" memoir of a young woman's struggle to regain her sense of self after trauma, and the efforts by a powerful New England boarding school to silence her--at any cost (Sally Mann, author of Hold Still ).

Shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing

Now with a New Afterword

When Notes on a Silencing hit bookstores in the summer of 2020, even amidst a global pandemic, it sent shockwaves through the country. Not only did this intimate investigative memoir usher in a media storm of coverage, but it also prompted the elite St. Paul's School to issue a formal apology to the author, Lacy Crawford, for its handling of her report of sexual assault by two fellow students nearly thirty years ago.

In this searing book, Crawford tells the story of coming forward during the state investigation of the elite New England prep school decades after her assault, only to find for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hardworking girl she'd been, as well as astonishing proof of an institutional silencing. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced as a student hadn't been imagined; they were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child.

This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry deep into gender, privilege, and power, and the ways shame and guilt are used to silence victims. Insightful, arresting, and beautifully written, Notes on a Silencing wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy?

"Erudite and devastating... Crawford's writing is astonishing... Notes on a Silencing is a purposefully named, brutal and brilliant retort to the asinine question of 'Why now?'... The story is crafted with the precision of a thriller, with revelations that sent me reeling..." --Jessica Knoll, New York Times

A Best Book of the Year: Time , NPR, People , Real Simple , Marie Claire , The Lineup , LitHub , Library Journal , BookPage , and Shelf Awareness

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

One of People Magazine 's 10 Best Books of the Year

Semifinalist for a Goodreads Choice Award

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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)

Booklist Review

Crawford, a journalist and author of the novel Early Decision (2013), begins her first memoir with its central, catastrophic event: past curfew one night in 1990, early in her junior year of high school, or "fifth form," as it was known at her elite New Hampshire boarding school, two senior boys sexually assaulted her. She kept the matter to herself, but a story nonetheless circulated. She then starts from the beginning of her time at St. Paul's, a rigorous institution where Crawford's significant privilege paled in contrast to that of many of her classmates, and decoding hierarchies proved to be its own difficult subject. She found a community through sport, but the assault's rippling effects eroded even that crucial connection. Acknowledging that a storyteller's choices in themselves tell a story, she 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.

Quincy Thomas Crane Library

Availability:

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Booklist Review