Donated Book Now Available at Samuels Public Library
Front Royal Women’s Resource Center and Royal Oak Bookshop co-sponsor donations to Samuels Public Library that are by or about women. Nan Hathaway, Book Donation Sponsor & Coordinator, chooses our books each year. Thank You Nan!
Notes on a Silencing
By Lacy Crawford
“The work of telling is essential, and it is not enough. There is always the danger that the energy of the injustice will exhaust itself in the revelation – that we will be horrified but remain unchanged.”
– Lacy Crawford
When the elite St. Paul’s School came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she had 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.
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 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 everything, 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.
Notes on a Silencing is a powerful and beautifully written memoir that reveals the unspoken – and often criminal – double standards that remain in elite spaces. This coming-of-age story wrestles with an essential question for our times: What telling of a survivor’s story will finally force a remedy? “Crawford’s courageous book is a bracing reminder of the dangers inherent in unchecked patriarchal power.” (Kirkus Reviews)
Lacy Crawford is the author of the novel Early Decision. She lives in Southern California with her family.