Lucia Osborne-Crowley - My Body Keeps Your Secrets

Praise for

my body keeps your secrets

A work of astonishing compassion, insight, and care.

Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries

It is both thrilling and terrifying when a body refuses to remain silent anymore. My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a beautiful and deeply moving book, and one that is vitally important: we have so much still to learn about the somatic nature of assault and trauma. Lucia Osborne-Crowley has written an insightful and moving witness statement for women who live with the consequences of assault and abuse, and for the world that has refused to see.

Our bodies hold our traumas, and Osborne-Crowley refuses to keep the silence anymore.

Virginia Trioli, journalist and author

Lucia Osborne-Crowley knows the natural range of the human body is so much greater than we have imagined. She has lived it. This book is a clever catalogue of the ways our bodies endure and the work they do in making sure we do, too. Osborne-Crowley writes with an elegant precision about this most urgent of subjects. Like the human body, this book contains a warning: if we do not attend to its revelations, there may well be pain. Bold, sharp and compassionate, this work announces Osborne-Crowley as a writer with great purpose.

Rick Morton, author of My Year of Living Vulnerably

Brave, unflinching and infuriating, the stories Lucia has collated are ones that desperately need to be heard.

Osman Faruqi, editor of the 7am podcast

This book brilliantly interrogates our relationship to our bodies but also to those around us, inhabiting each daily, hourly, minute-by-minute contradiction that having a body, and so being alive, entails. A testament to the power of externalising our own stories so as to understand them through others eyes, demonstrating how inextricably connected each of us ultimately is. Her writing is beautiful, unflinching and clear and, most importantly, it renders shame visiblea material thing that, having been sewn into the body, can also be cast off.

Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

An extraordinary achievement, told with such clarity and anger, so much truth, but also with such love and hope and vulnerability.

Sophie Mackintosh, author of Booker-longlisted The Water Cure and Blue Ticket

This book is a burning manifesto for the revolutionary act of articulating shame and trauma. It is a testament to the feminist praxis of listening to each others stories in collective solidarity as a refusal of erasure and a way to claim presence and power in the world.

Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater

Through the stories of women and non-binary people about abuse and recovery, as well as her own experience of sexual assault and chronic pain, Lucia Osborne-Crowley reaches the depths of haunting secrets locked into the body, and exposes the connection between untreated trauma, inflicted shame and long-term illness.

Nataliya Deleva, author of Peroto Literary Award-winning novel Four Minutes

This book will save lives. Through rich storytelling, Lucia imposes on us the harsh realities that untreated trauma and shame have on our physical selves. A powerful collection of deeply personal stories that will resonate with women young and old.

Emma Husar, former Labor MP

First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2021

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by The Indigo Press

Copyright Lucia Osborne-Crowley 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Extracts from Blythe Bairds poems Relapse (2016) on pp. 5556 and I Have Run Out of Compassion for Wolves (2016) on pp. 11112 are reproduced with kind permission from the author. Extracts from Olivia Gatwoods poems Life of the Party (2019) on p. 219 and Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2015) on p. 219 and p. 296 are reproduced with kind permission from the author.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers at the address below.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web:www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 810 8

eISBN 978 1 76106 198 1

Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

Cover design: Laura Thomas

Cover image: Arelix/iStock (after Matisse)

To everyone I interviewed for this book, thank you for lifting me up with your bravery, eloquence and grace. This is for you.

What part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive?

Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You

What is your aim in philosophy?

To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations

a list in three parts

From Chanel Miller, Know My Name

(1)

0 hours to 24 hours after:

Numbness

Light-headedness

Unidentified fear

Shock

I READ ONCE THAT IF you want to forgive somethingI mean really forgivesomething has to die. That grief and loss and acceptance are necessary ingredients of truly letting go. Ive been thinking about that a lot lately.

Ive also been thinking a lot about philosopher Ludwig Wittgensteins fly in the bottle. Wittgenstein said that being a victim of systemic abuse is akin to being a fly trapped in a glass bottle. The fly can see out at the world because the glass is transparent. But the structure of the bottle is so vast and so consuming of the flys small world that it cannot see the glass it is looking through; it thinks it is seeing the world as it really is.

And because the fly cannot see the structure imprisoning it, it is useless to say: you are in a bottle! The fly trusts that its perception of the world is real; to it there is no bottle.

All you can do is help the fly escape the bottle. Only from the outside, flying above it, will the fly be able to see what was imprisoning her.

The body is a very lonely place, especially when it is under threat. And some bodies are always under threat.

As I write this, the world is facing a crisis, the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The UK is in lockdown. Boris Johnsons government has closed all schools and cancelled GCSE and A-level exams until further notice. The whole country has been ordered to work from home.

We are not allowed to go to friends houses. All the bars, restaurants and cafes have been ordered to close. A few remain open for takeaways only, but anyone lining up must stand at least two metres away from other people.