“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 2020: Time, NPR, People, Real Simple, Marie Claire, The Lineup, LitHub, … 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
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?
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I just finished Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford. I’m a slow reader, but I read this book in two days. It’s powerful! It is a memoir about Lacy’s experience with sexual assault at an elite New England prep school, and how the school covered up the assault and persecuted Lacy in different ways that impacted her entire life. The memoir looks deeply at how powerful people and institutions manipulate judicial systems, how they use shame, guilt, and humiliation to crush victims. In this case though, Lacy takes the power back into her own hands and has the final word with her breathtaking book.
NONFICTION: In writing about her assault as a teen, Lacy Crawford examines how one institution silenced victims.
By Jenny Shank Special to the Star Tribune JUNE 26, 2020
https://www.startribune.com/review-no…
In 1990, when Lacy Crawford was a 15-year-old student at St. Paul’s — an elite New Hampshire boarding school whose alumni include John Kerry, Robert Mueller III, and the fictional James Bond — an 18-year-old hockey star lured her to his room, asking for help with a math assignment. Crawford had tutored another hockey player and was flattered to be asked.
She walked to his dorm room, where he and his roommate hoisted her through their window and onto a bed. Both men were naked, held her down, and after she pleaded, “Just don’t have sex with me,” they violently orally assaulted her. She didn’t cry out for help because the seniors lived near a faculty member, who could expel her for violating curfew.
“What they had done, I told myself, was not that bad,” Crawford writes. “I had gotten away without worse, without the worst. I was fine. But I was shattered. Why? What part of me was broken? I rehearsed it over and over: I broke school rules and went to the room of an older boy.”
She was sure she’d be blamed, and when she finally told someone months later, her instinct proved correct. The assault, which generated rumors and recriminations that shadowed her for decades, was a statutory crime, but back then she didn’t have the words to apply to what happened. Instead, the perpetrators and the institution that sheltered them applied their own words. As one school official told her father, “She’s not a good girl.”
To prevent Crawford’s family from taking legal action, school representatives threatened to expose her private life and falsely accuse her of being a drug dealer, which would scuttle her college dreams. St. Paul’s enjoyed political connections that helped quash similar accusations against teachers and students for decades; one young woman from St. Paul’s finally achieved a conviction for her rapist in 2015.
“Notes on a Silencing” is a horror story, depicting a prep school as a hunting ground. Crawford writes with clarity and rueful authority. She’s detailed and specific, and corroborates all her memories with medical and police reports and other written records. “Notes on a Silencing” is as much a work of meticulous investigative journalism as it is a memoir; Crawford writes like someone who’s used to not being believed.
This experience was so damaging to her developing brain that for years it was difficult for her to comprehend all its repercussions; at last she has pieced together an intricate story as an artist might fashion a beautiful mosaic out of shards.
In Jon Ronson’s insightful 2015 book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” he concludes that people who best survive a bout of public shaming are those who refuse to accept shame. In the examples Ronson cites, most survivors are shameless, utterly without scruples over their wrongdoing. But Crawford demonstrates another path to survival: elucidating, through a painstaking investigation and self-examination, how shame has been cast in the wrong place.
After those rapists savaged Crawford’s throat, leaving her with a deeply embedded herpes infection, she could no longer sing in her beloved school choir without pain. In telling her story 30 years later, she must sing alone, but she does so with a strong, clear, unimpeachable voice.
Jenny Shank’s short story collection, “Mixed Company,” won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in October 2021. Her novel, “The Ringer,” won the High Plains Book Award. She teaches in the Mile High MFA Program and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic.
Thank you Librofm, Lacy Crawford, & Hachette Audio for gifting me this audiobook. This review is my own.
4/5 Stars
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To be completely transparent, I sometimes struggle with memoirs, especially in I have a hard time connecting with the main character. However, listening to this on audiobook with Lacy Crawford narrating really helped bring this book and her story to life. Lacy’s story was so tragic that it could have easily been a work of fiction, if only these events hadn’t actually occur to her. Boarding school was suppose to be a safe place for her, it turned out it was anything but.
I found it interesting to listen to Lacy describe the reasonings behind her actions as a child. As an adult, I can easily say what “I would have done” but it does leave me questioning what high school me would have done under the same scenario. I also thought that this book helped to shed light on the shame, secrecy, and humiliation that most survivors of sexual assault live with and endure on a daily basis. I’m sure this was not an easy story to tell, but it was one that needed to be brought into the light.
The beginning of this book was hard for me to track and subsequently be drawn into. There are a lot of characters in and out of the story and at times I wasn’t sure where we were at in the storyline progression. Thankfully there came a point where it all started to click and the emotional entanglement I made with Lacy and her story seemed to draw me in.
If you can, I highly recommend listening to this on audiobook so that Lacy’s voice can really shine through.
If you would like an honest, and very real look inside of how private schools in New England (particularly/especially those affiliated with the church) operate as well as the complete lack of justice that follows… look no further. This book is the tip of the corrupt iceberg that is the so called justice system in this country, and in New England. The schools, like the courts, are run by the good ol’ boys clubs and they will circle the wagons and do anything to keep their reputations in tact.
Thank you Lacy for having the courage to write your truth. The truth doesn’t change simply because it has been silenced.