Book of the Week (7/6/2020)

Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford (NY: Little, Brown, and Company, 2020).

When the elite St. Paul's School came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she'd put behind her the assault she'd suffered decades before, when she was fifteen. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note.

With her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hardworking girl she'd been, a chorister and debater, the daughter of a priest; of the two senior athletes who assaulted her and were allowed to graduate with awards; and of the faculty, doctors, and priests who had known about Crawford's assault and gone to great lengths to bury it.

Now a wife, mother, and writer living on the other side of the country, Crawford learned that police had uncovered astonishing proof of an institutional silencing years before, and that unnamed powers were still trying to block her case. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced as a student hadn't been the imagined effects of trauma, after all: these were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child.

This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry into the ways gender, privilege, and power shaped her experience as a girl at the gates of America's elite. Her investigation looks beyond the sprawling playing fields and soaring chapel towers of crucibles of power like St. Paul's, whose reckoning is still to come. And it runs deep into the channels of shame and guilt, witness and silencing, that dictate who can speak and who is heard in American society.

An insightful, mature, beautifully written memoir, Notes on a Silencing is an arresting coming-of-age story that wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy? -- Publisher's blurb.

Join author Lacy Crawford, virtually via Gibson's Bookstore, to discuss her memoir. She will be joined by Kathy Giles, the rector of St. Paul's School, for a discussion on what it takes for communities to change. Their conversation will be moderated by Alyssa Dandrea, court journalist for the Concord Monitor newspaper.
The discussion will take place online only via Zoom on Tuesday, July 21st, 2020, 6pm EDT. This event is free to attend, but registration is required: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_P7fZJZmpT46AluzuKal04w