Know My Name: A Memoir Paperback – August 18, 2020

This is such an incredible book that for the first time ever, I wish I could give a book six stars because five isn’t sufficient. Or downgrade all the other ratings I've ever given and say, "No, this one. This is the actual five star book." No other book has ever made me feel so intensely so empathize so completely with my entire being. It infuriated me, empowered me, made me want to clutch the book to my chest and sob for the injustices that victims of sexual assault are made to suffer again and again while our systems, society, and culture protect those who do the assaulting. I wish I could make everyone read this beautiful, luminous, powerful book. It should be required reading for every high school student in the US. It should be required reading for every human being on the planet.Know My Name is Chanel Miller's memoir about the night she was sexually assaulted behind a dumpster while attending a fraternity party at Stanford, about waking up in the hospital to medical staff and police telling her only fragments of the hours missing from her memory, about learning how to live her life in the aftermath while the subsequent investigation and trial dragged on for years, about reliving the worst moment of her life while her rapist’s friends, family, and defense team launched assault after assault on her character and her decisions, about fighting to bring about institutional change in the way Stanford handles campus assault. This is a book about trauma, shame, healing, survival, rape culture, class privilege, and what it’s like to be a woman.In one part of the book, she says that the man who assaulted her will be known as "swimmer turned rapist" while she will be known as "the victim who wrote a book". Chanel Miller is a brilliant, thoughtful, funny, incandescent human being who has so much strength and compassion and humanity. She is quite possibly one of the most gifted writers of this generation. What happened to her doesn't define her. She doesn't need anyone's pity. She's going to achieve tremendous, magnificent things with her unforgettable voice, and I feel very lucky that I'm going to get to see it as it happens.

As a sexual assault survivor who was raped and going thru the court system at the same time as Chanel, the Brock Turner rape case was inextricably tied to the ups and downs of my own recovery. I was her and she was me as the court system churned and slowly tortured us both. To be able to read her statement and see it gain global attention helped me immensely to put words to what I had experienced.Now I got to preorder her book, know her name, and support her. I read this book in about seven hours. It was like walking back thru the last 4 years of my own recovery in an alternate universe—Chanel’s universe. I found everything she said so grounding in its honesty. It was never unnecessarily graphic or gruesome for cheap shock value, but a rich and complex prose of how it is to be a woman and lose any girlish notions of safety or naïveté when sexual violence occurs.This is as accurate a portrait of survivorship as one can find and there are millions of portraits just like her walking around you everyday as 1 in 5 women experience sexual violence.Chanel is unique and beautiful and yet not unique as millions identify with her experiences. Please read and support this critical and multilayered analysis of her experience as she ties it to her childhood all the way thru several current political events of today.My boyfriend supported me for wherever I needed to be emotionally while reading this book, sleeping on the couch to stay in the room with me til almost 4am when I was done. He knows I am a sexual abuse survivor and now he can read this book and the weight of trying to describe on my own what that’s like is lighter because Chanel has sacrificed yet again.Lastly, I want to say this book was very healing for my sense of self esteem. It’s hard to explain why but hearing ways she has reclaimed herself thru the endless war with herself as a victim mirrors my fight also. Her validation journey helps me access more firmly my own validation. I cried more happy healing tears than sad tears. I will never forget this book.

Like many other people, I remembered the Brock Turner trial. The young woman, found outside being assaulted in an alleyway by a Stanford swimmer. The European grad students who stopped it, who chased him down. The trial. Her searing victim impact statement. The pathetically light sentence. The judge who issued it being recalled. Amid the larger social meaning of it all, it can be startlingly easy to forget that there was a full human being who this particular thing happened to. Chanel Miller’s memoir ensures that forgetting, even for a moment, a victim’s fundamental personhood will be well nigh impossible to do. And it makes it clear how much, in addition to the crime perpetrated against them, “the process” serves to continue that trauma, inflict it in new ways. The constant delays kept her suspended in time, unable to move forward. She had to constantly relive the experience of waking up in the hospital, confused, of being poked and prodded and invaded all over again to complete the rape kit. She wasn’t able to continue working. She could not fully let her guard down around her sister for fear of contaminating her sister’s testimony. She contemplated suicide. It’s just gut pinch after gut punch. But Miller’s incisive, clear writing, telling an incredibly powerful story, is well worth it if you can stomach the subject matter. An incredible book that should be required reading (especially for men).

This was am heartbreaking book. I know that the justice system tends to be unjust (see the irony there), but to be able to see it from the POV of a survivor, someone who had to face it head on... unbelievable. We all know that court is not kind to victims, specially sexual assault victims, but to see how one of the them is dragged though the mud, her character defined by that moment, after having been through hell, it's disgusting. Anyways, this is a book of resilience, a book that inspires people to keep fighting, specifically victims, to achieve the end-goal of justice for the one that wronged them. Miller's case became so sensational that it managed to actually change the law, through her strength she managed to make the world a little bit of a better place. Don't be dissuaded though, there's still a lot to be done.

One of the most detailed books on the justice system with respect to sexual assault and the events related to it. How it impacts an individual and everyone surrounding them.

Of you are a human, living on this planet, you should read this book. It is important, and written beautifully even when writing from and through pain.

Chanels way of telling her story is remarkable. It's honest and it shows very well how difficult life can become, simply because someone else decided to assault you.Even though she addresses this issue, it's not about revenge or pointing the finger at anyone involved in the process. It is more about making people who haven't experienced an assault understand how it affects the victim.A very powerful book!

It seems the only reason this book has had any bad reviews here so far is because it either gives the reader anxiety (which I can understand if you yourself are a victim of abuse) or because it is not suited to an audio format. Neither of these reasons should take away from the fact that this book has been courageously written and is a sobering, inspiring and at times, a humorous read. It gives a fascinating insight into the flaws of the justice system especially against those of abuse and how abuse completely upends not just one life but those surrounded by the event. The book does not inflict hate onto men but it does for me, as a woman, inspire a wider and united belief that gender violence/harassment/abuse is a universal issue that needs to be further addressed. I can't recommend it enough.