Raine - After silence: rape and my journey back

An exquisitely written account of a personal journey to hell and back . Raine writes with a rare eloquence even as she describes the most horrible scenes and emotions . Raine courageously leaves no part of her inner soul unbared and no social taboo unquestioned as she seeks to better understand one of Americas most unspeakable crimes . This elegaic odyssey toward understanding will speak to anyone who has undergone a similar disaster and brings light to a subject generally cloaked in darkness.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

What makes this book so memorable is her story and the powerful, literary way she tells it.

Newsweek

After Silence is not just a well-crafted exploration of an important issue in our society. It achieves the highest aspiration of literature. It is an engrossing story that shines a light on the deep truths and mysteries of the human spirit.

Book magazine

Deeply thought-provoking and emotionally powerful, After Silence made me rethink many of my ideas and feelings about rape. Nancy Raine addresses issues that many others have addressed beforebut she does it on a much more profound and visceral level than I have yet seen.

MARY GAITSKILL

Raine gives us a face and an eloquent voice to the crime of rape.

USA Today

This is an important work to help both men and women better understand the overlapping dimensions of this once-taboo subject.

Detroit Free Press

Raines fearless and probing work may be among the most eloquent as well as one of the most intelligent accounts to date . Regardless of whether the reader or a loved one is a rape survivor, there is much to be learned from this excellent work about the nature of rape and survival.

Booklist (starred review)

What Nancy Venable Raine gives us in After Silence is a brilliant and complex vision of evil and redemption. Like all seminal works, this book will change the way we think. It will change the way we consider the we and they of rape.

LYNN FREED

An exceptionally honest and compelling account of rape Raine describes with insightful detail the rape-induced trauma she endured years after the physical trauma had healed . Highly recommended.

Library Journal

Who could imagine such a calm, wise, beautifully written book on the subject of rape? After Silence is a gift to others who, like Nancy Raine, have triumphed over terror. Its also a gift to the friends, family, spouses, and partners of rape victims. To read this book is to understand.

CYRA MCFADDEN

In this searing account of her own brutal rape in 1985 beginning with the day she was raped in her Boston apartment by a stranger, the author takes us on her journey toward healing in a powerful memoir that just may help heal others who share her nightmare.

Chicago Tribune

This is an inspiring account of how a shattering experience, with its insidious effects long after, can be transcended by literature.

DIANE JOHNSON

For Steve, with love
And in tribute to Dr. Deborah S. Rose

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.

ADRIENNE RICH,
Diving into the Wreck

Throw away the lights, the definitions

And say of what you see in the dark

WALLACE STEVENS,
The Man with the Blue Guitar

Speech is civilization itself. The word preserves contactit is silence which isolates.

THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain

O n an October afternoon in 1985 I was raped by a stranger who crept through the open back door of my apartment while I was taking out the trash. My back was turned to that door for less than a minute as I shoved the slippery green bags down into the garbage cans. Seven years to the day and hour, I carried trash out of another home thousands of miles away from that place, and as I bent over the barrels with my back to the street, the fear of that day returned to me as if no time had passed. I spun around and scanned the driveway, my heart pounding. No one was there. Just dry leaves, caught up in the wind, rattling along on brittle edges in light filtering through the trees.

This day was very like that day seven years beforewarm, the sun bright in a flawless sky. I was single then, living in Boston, Massachusetts. Now I was married, living in Sausalito, California. But my husband, Steve, was at work. I was alone. Taking out the trash. Seven yearsand this daily chore was still charged. I lived with sudden fear the way others live with cancer. The fear was always there, in warrens just below the surface of my skin, waiting. Through associations that were a language only I knew, the fear could spring suddenly into the light with its squinting brood of memories tumbling after it.

Back inside the house, the door locked behind me, I thought how odd it was that this dateOctober 11, 1992, the seventh anniversary of my rapewas more significant than my own birthday, and yet there was only silence. It was more significant because it marked again the death of the person I had been for thirty-nine years. This woman had a historyshe had worked her way through a masters degree and a brief, unhappy marriage, more or less at the same time. She had held responsible positions in government, written articles, published poems, produced independent documentary films, run several nonprofit arts organizations, and started her own consulting business. She had frustrations, straw hats, boyfriends, unreturned phone calls, cellulite, debts. The usual stuff. But on October 11, 1985, she died. Another person was born that day.

Yet no one remembered. No one pinned a medal on my lapel. Not that I was any sort of heroine, but I had survived. And yet no one celebrated. The police said I was lucky not to have been murdered. I knew they were right. A year and a half after the rape I had married a man who brought a son and daughter into my life; I moved across the country to be with them. We had renovated a dilapidated house in a lush ravine with a creek that tumbled over stones year round, filling our home with its voice. Steve and I had turned a blackberry bramble into a woodland garden with crooked paths and a happy riot of ferns, Meidiland shrub roses, sweet woodruff, and calla lilies. I had made new friends and colleagues. Bought new hats. What I now called my life was extra time.

But that day, when the police told me I was lucky, I didnt feel grateful. Their observation only reminded me of my powerlessness, that even my survival had been out of my hands. There is no explanation for why I was raped, no explanation for why the rapist didnt kill me, as he threatened over and over. It is hard to live without explanations. It hurls you into a whirlwind of dangerous forces you have lost the power to name and the rituals to appease. After seven years I was only beginning to abandon the search for reasons, only beginning to know the flesh-and-blood person I had become, the one who marked her anniversaries in silence. But after seven years I wanted more than silence and isolation. I wanted to celebrate the life of the woman who was born on October 11.