Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery - Softcover

Weaver Francisco, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060930764 ISBN 13: 9780060930769

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2000

Synopsis

She invites the reader into her life and into the questions raised by a crime with no obvious solutions or easy answers. We see the dimensions of a human struggle often kept hidden from view. While there are an estimated twelve million rape survivors in the United States, rape is still unspeakable, left out of our personal and cultural conversation. In Telling, Francisco has found a language for the secret grief carried by men and women who have survived rape.

About this title

About the Author:

Patricia Fransisco teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Hamline University. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Telling requires a kind of courage that I normally lack. This book is an exertion, a promise I'm keeping, and it's slow going." Readers may find the going slow, too, because Francisco (Cold Feet) writes in an almost halting, episodic style as she breaks a long silence to write about rape and its long, perhaps endless, aftermath. Her memoir is deliberately self-conscious in its revelations of what happened, in its exploration of emotion and in its construction of meaning. And it works, because Francisco's method is appropriate to the larger argument that animates the memoir: that, while telling is excruciating, silence is poison. In 1981, while her husband, Tim, was in Vermont, an intruder broke into her Minneapolis home and raped her. Francisco underwent counseling and received a great deal of love and support from both Tim and her friends. However, despite her best efforts to carry on with her life, she found that she was unable to recover completely from the trauma. She now attributes the difficult labor she endured four years later while giving birth to her son to a suppressed physiological memory of the rape. She also feels that her ordeal placed a stress on her and Tim that contributed to their subsequent divorce. In order to complete her recovery, Francisco needed publicly to acknowledge what happened to her. So she attended several Minnesota rape trials and participated in the "Silent Witness" project, which publicizes cases of women killed in domestic violence. In this fierce book, she strikes a difficult balance between the subjectivity of memoir and an eloquent argument that society must look sexual assault in the face before it can be stopped. Agent, Ellen Levine.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0060930764
• ISBN 13: 9780060930769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240