MEMOIR
KNOW MY NAME
By Chanel Miller
Viking/Paperback/ 357 pages/$27.82/ Books Kinokuniya
4.5 stars
For years, the world knew her as Emily Doe - the nameless, faceless victim that Stanford University student Brock Turner sexually assaulted while she lay unconscious next to a dumpster at a fraternity party in 2015.
Now, the world knows her real name: Chanel Miller. She has put that name to a searing memoir that will knock the breath out of you.
Miller's case precedes the #MeToo movement, but it is tightly interwoven with that conversation around rape culture and how the system stacks the deck against victims.
Turner was a star swimmer; his father protested that the six-year prison sentence the prosecution asked for would be a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life".
Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months in jail - he was released three months early - and three years of probation. This generated widespread backlash that would eventually lead to Persky being recalled.
But enough about Turner. This is the story of Miller, who was 22 years old when the attack occurred and had been at the party only because she was accompanying her younger sister Tiffany and a friend, Julia.
There are things about Miller's identity that her anonymity had erased, which, now revealed, cast her experience in a new light.
For instance, she is half-Chinese and as an Asian-American, she felt like she had grown up in the margins, fed media stereotypes of submissive side characters who looked like her.
"I had grown used to being unseen, to never being fully known," she reflects. "It did not feel possible that I could be the protagonist."
Miller is a remarkable writer. This was already clear from her victim impact statement, so moving that it went viral and was read 11 million times in four days.
Now, she presents the powerfully honed narrative of the unravelling of her life and it is hard to look away.
She has a singular eye for details that stick in the mind - the oatmeal-coloured sweater she chooses to wear in court; the tiny dog she adopts and names Mogu (Chinese for "mushroom"); the bag full of pine needles plucked out of her hair at the hospital after her assault.
She tracks the fallout from the assault and trial - not just emotional, but also financial. It is expensive, she discovers, to be a victim - there are the hospital bills, the hours of therapy, even the new clothes she needs to buy for court to look "respectable".
She has to leave her job. Her sister risks not graduating on time because she has to keep rescheduling her examinations to testify at the trial.
Miller's experience is unique, but she also positions herself as an Everywoman, as just one of multitudes. If #MeToo showed people anything, it is that victims have been around them all along.
In fact, Miller points out, she is in the absurd position of being a "privileged" victim. She had evidence and eyewitnesses, savings in her bank account, a support system of loving family, friends and a boyfriend. Many victims lack such resources.
"The only thing running through my head when my sister picked me up that morning was, 'Thank God me,'" she writes.
"Thank God me and not her, not Julia, not an 18-year-old who would have had to forgo her schooling... In a strange way I was prepared to go on this journey."
Assault buries the self, Miller observes. Writing is her way of unearthing it - and not just her own.
In one of the book's most moving sections, she recounts the stories she received in response to her own, in thousands of letters in grocery bags from her district attorney.
"A woman who said she was sitting on the couch with her daughter surrounded by boxes, preparing to flee her abusive ex-husband, telling me she knew they were no longer alone. A mother who plucked the holiday card of her toddler from the inside of her cubicle, scribbling on the back, This is who you're saving.
"A wife who woke up her husband, turning on the side light, to tell him her story. I received an e-mail from a 16-year-old who said that for the first time in two years she could finally get out of bed in the morning. That's the image I am left with, the now empty bed."
It is not closure or vengeance Miller is after in her book.
"We don't fight for our own happy endings," she writes. "We fight to say, you can't."
It is unimaginable, the courage it must take for a victim to expose to public scrutiny a self so precariously held together and at such cost. Yet she has given the world her name and, with it, her story and her hope. What a gift.
If you like this, read: Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay (Atlantic Books, 2019, $22.95, Books Kinokuniya), an anthology of first-person essays on topics ranging from the rape epidemic within the refugee crisis to street harassment, and from child molestation to the effect of assault on mental health.
