I recently ventured down to San Diego for a literary salon at the home of writer, editor and pie maker extraordinaire Amy Wallen. It was so invigorating to be back in community once again, in real life!
There, I had the opportunity to meet Lacy Crawford whose memoir Notes on a Silencing sent a shiver down readers' collective spine, causing a notable stir even as it was released during the pandemic. It was named Best Book of 2020 by Time, People, and NPR.
At 15-years-old, Lacy was the victim of sexual assault at a high-profile boarding school that covered it up, until the state of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation 30 years later. But as she describes in our interview below, this story is not so much about the assault as it is about an institutional silencing. She details with stunning articulation how imperative it is that we write to the urgency and relevance of the experiences that live in us, breaking through any of the perceived taboos, shame, or dismissive attitudes that may be holding us back.
Please read this important conversation.
Lacy Crawford is the author of fiction and nonfiction, including the satire Early Decision (Morrow 2013) and the memoir Notes on a Silencing (Little Brown 2020).
Lacy’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Narrative, LitHub, and Vanity Fair and her literary journalism includes interviews and profiles of Frank Conroy, Reynolds Price, Geoffrey Wolff, and Shirley Hazzard.
She lives in California with her husband and three children.
When Notes on a Silencing hit bookstores in the summer of 2020, it sent shockwaves through the country. Not only did this intimate investigative memoir usher in a media storm of coverage, but it also prompted the elite St. Paul's School to issue a formal apology to the author, Lacy Crawford, for its handling of her report of sexual assault by two fellow students nearly thirty years ago.
It was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book, as well as a Best Book of 2020 by Time, People, NPR, BookPage, Library Journal and LitHub.
“…brutal and brilliant… Crawford’s writing is astonishing… crafted with the precision of a thriller, with revelations that sent me reeling.” —The New York Times
KARIN GUTMAN: You started off, early on, writing a fictionalized version of your personal story. Tell us about that.
LACY CRAWFORD: Yes, I wrote a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about what had happened. I gave my whole self to it. There was an editor who believed in the book and believed in me who sent the manuscript to a very prominent literary agent who otherwise would never have taken an email from me. This was in 2001. She got the manuscript on a Friday, and I spent the weekend wondering if maybe everything was about to begin. She called me on Tuesday morning and said, “Yeah, there are some good characters, some lovely writing and nice sentences, but I didn't love it. And the truth is that date rape stories are a dime a dozen.”
I now know that the fact that this agent even read my pages and bothered to get back to me is extraordinary, and I might have taken a hard look at the manuscript and sent it to a bunch of other agents or maybe thought, I'm not quite there yet; I’ll do some other things, maybe write some stories. Maybe apply for an MFA. But instead, I collapsed. I could not handle that term “dime a dozen.”
First of all, what happened to me wasn't date rape. (I think there's no such thing as date rape. The minute you start getting raped, your date is over.) But I didn't quite understand how to manage the fact that because there's something that happens so often, to women especially, that we shouldn't bother writing about it. I think the things that happen often to women are things that we should write more about, all the time, because they're an expression of our reality and the experience of our society.
I was demoralized, and I quit writing.
KARIN: It really shut you down.
LACY: I was very brittle at that time. I should say, a little bit in my defense, that I had graduated from a college with a fantastic creative writing program, and some writers who are now household names were contemporaries of mine on campus and already publishing, producing this magnificent work, when we were teenagers and in our early twenties. I had the impression that if you're good—whatever that means—it's apparent, you arrive with all of the timpani, and everybody knows it right out of the gate. That there's a kind of magic that happens when somebody has the requisite talent. I had convinced myself of this.
The thing that I continue to learn over and over is that, while talent is clear and powerful, there are a great many truly extraordinary books that don't get published simply because they can't be marketed effectively, and there are plenty of not-so-exquisite books that do get sold, and publishing is not necessarily the pure meritocracy that I for so long believed it was. It just isn't. You get lucky or you don't, you have talent or you don’t, but you do your work.
KARIN: You eventually found your way back to writing and published your first book, Early Decision, which was a satire about the college admissions process. You were ahead of the curve with both books!
LACY: Thank you for saying that.
KARIN: How did you find your way back to what would become your memoir?
LACY: In 2017, the state of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation into my boarding school, which is how I turned my attention back to the experiences that I’d had in high school.
KARIN: Did the investigators approach you, or did you approach them?
LACY: I reached out to them. There had been so many stories of assault and abuse on the campus of St. Paul’s School, including the 2014 assault of Chessy Prout, a freshman, by Owen Labrie, a Harvard-bound senior. When the school threatened to reveal Chessy’s name in court filings, she chose to appear on the Today Show to talk about what had happened to her, at which point her case rose to national attention.
When the state of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation, they issued a call to anyone who had experience of the school having failed to report assaults or abuse on campus, as they were legally mandated to do, or having observed the school to in some way obstruct justice or cover up investigations. Completely privately, I sent the Attorney General’s office an email. I said I was assaulted at St. Paul's when I was 15, in October of 1990, and the school covered it up. They sent back a form email. And then an hour later, my phone rang. It was a detective, and he said, “We pulled your criminal case file off microfiche in the Concord Police Department, and we would like to talk to you.”
I had no intention of writing about this or talking about this or going public about it. I did not want my children to ever have to know this about me.
KARIN: What was the tipping point for you?
LACY: I was prompted when the state investigation was stymied, when my participation was shut down, which was a horrible development that I explain in the book.
As I told you, when I had tried to write this story in my 20s, I was told such stories are a dime a dozen, and I believed the sentiment behind that. I thought, That's right, nobody wants to hear these stories. But once I had documentary proof of how the school had covered up my assault, how they lied to police and to my family and to my physicians, I was on fire to tell what had happened in a way that wasn't about wanting to write a memoir. This wasn't a genre-specific urging, this was not a professional ambition. This was like an iron bar in my heart. I am going to say what happened, and whatever happens next, I can't control. But damn it, I am going to say this because I was a girl. And I'm a mom now. I don't have a daughter. But I have kids who are old enough now that I know what 15 is. And 15 is young. 15-year-olds are kids.
So, I sat down.
KARIN: It feels emotional to hear you say, “I was a girl.” It’s like you're coming to her defense.
LACY: That's right. I was separated from her, and I went back for her. Yes, I did. It is emotional for everyone who goes back to a moment—these moments that we write about that separate our lives into “the before” and “the after,” whatever that moment is. Often these moments are things that happen to a lot of people—a parent dies, for example, and you're shattered. I hear writers sometimes say, “Well, that happens to everyone.” That's why you have to write about it! That is exactly why. Or miscarriage. Or childbirth—even when it goes well, it's a catastrophe. In some way, something is shattered.
When I was drafting, #MeToo was sweeping the globe, so here's Weinstein and all these monsters are falling. And I thought, What I'm going to do is say, as simply as I can, everything that happened. Because I was there and I see it now—she wasn't wrong. I wasn't wrong. The first page of my book is the first page I wrote, and I wrote it almost to the word the way it is. This is what happened. That's all, no value judgment, no particular valence of suspense or ethos or character, just: this is what happened.
And then, how do you make a reader care? Because this happens all the time. Well, that's why a reader needs to care. Why does it happen all the time? Interesting. Now it starts to open up. It happens all the time because girls are held responsible for the agency of boys and men. We let them be presidents and surgeons and astronauts. But when it comes to assault, we're like, “Oh, what did she do? What was she wearing? Did she drink?” He can run the country but he can't control his own... you know. I'm being very blunt and also generalizing and I recognize that. All assault is not heteronormative and all victims are not female and all predators are not male. The complexity of that is everywhere in our communities, and particularly in this community that I was in.
I realized that in order to get this story into the world, I could sue the school, which I wasn't going to do, or I could talk to the media. I actually spoke with a couple of reporters who were ready to go, but then someone else would be telling my story, and I'm a writer. If there's one thing that hasn't gone away, it's that I write. That's what I do. So, option three was: I write the damn thing, come hell or high water. And that's what I did. I wrote it very quickly.
KARIN: How did you find a way to make the reader care?
LACY: I wrote it with the sense that it had to hold a reader to the page. You have to give them a reason to stick around. All the more, you have to make them care about the girl this is happening to. Now, that's an interesting problem if the girl it had happened to is you, and you have a kind of conflicted relationship to her. For me, I hated the girl that it happened to. I have been ashamed of what happened to me all my adult life. It ruined half of my teens. It ruined my 20s. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship with the same man for eight years in my 20s, basically as a way to try to run away from what had happened. In order to write this book effectively, I had to do it in a way that made her likable. So, oddly, I had to animate compassion for myself, but it was a craft problem, not a therapy problem. Does that make sense?
KARIN: Can you give an example?
I was assaulted at an elite boarding school whose tuition is now $70,000 a year or something. I was, in a sense, a rich kid. Not rich the way rich people are now—I grew up in a normal house and my dad went to work every day and my mom went to work once we were in school. But I grew up with plenty of privilege. I'm also white and I'm also straight. I have a lot of advantages that made it such that when bad things did happen to me, as they happen to everyone, I had the resources to survive. So how is it appropriate for me to ask for attention? Why should I speak up, right now when we are not hearing enough from Black, brown, Indigenous, non-binary, non-gender-conforming writers, from all of the people who have been victimized so much more than I was? Why should I claim any space at all right now? That was a real question I asked myself.
The answer that I came to, whether it's right or not, is because I actually have access to the intricacies of an institutional silencing. I have it on paper now, in records and memos. I can show how they do it, because this happens all the time—in schools and churches and the Air Force and USA Gymnastics and all of these institutions. We know that even in families, things are covered up. Abuse is buried. There's a lot of fancy footwork that goes on and lawyers assist with this and priests assist with this and teachers and parents sometimes, and I was able to demonstrate how that happened. What this meant was the book was not about an assault. The book was about an institutional silencing.
In order to tell that story, the reader has to know the institution. How do you introduce a boarding school to people who have never been there? How do you make it a place worth learning about? You have to show them what was seductive. And there was a lot that was seductive, not just Harry Potter-seductive, with the dining halls and the candles and the whole thing, but feeling chosen and feeling that the whole world is your oyster, which is a feeling that to some extent these schools sell. So, it was a constant balancing act between holding what would potentially create resistance or indifference to my story, and finding a way to tell it that opened it up as much as possible for people who hadn't had the experiences I had. I don't know that I would have been thinking about those things if I hadn't felt like I needed to tell this right now, because some people still at that school needed to be fired. That was the feeling of it. It was almost mechanical.
KARIN: You say you wrote it quickly. Did it just pour out of you?
LACY: It did. This is the fourth book I’d written by that point. I do think those years spent working on things that didn't go anywhere, I was teaching myself. I would have thought that was horseshit a while ago, but actually, that's true. For anyone who's a runner, these are your long-distance miles, and they're there when you need them on race day. That happened for me. I wrote it in four months. I didn't have all day, my youngest was in preschool, so I wrote only in the mornings, and then on weekends, which meant I never saw my husband—what it does to a marriage when you never see your husband because you're writing about your sexual assault is not awesome, but that's a different thing.
I wrote that first page, which is the assault. I wanted that out of the way because it's not actually very interesting. It's completely boring and it happens all the time. A dime a dozen, right? What's interesting is how communities permit this to happen. What's our culpability there, all of us? And then what happens next?
I realized that in order for anyone to care about the girl to whom it had happened, I would have to go back, of course, to explain who I was and how I ended up in that room. But the thing I hate in memoir is when you open with something exciting, and then chapter two is: But back in 1986 when I was 11, it didn't feel that way... and the air goes out of the balloon. I was fighting against that all the time. How do you get the backstory in there in such a way that you keep the narrative clock running? The way I addressed this problem was by bringing in what was happening during the drafting, in real time, as I participated in this state investigation that was going nowhere.
In the book, we effectively have three points of time: we have the assault and what happens from there. We have the state investigation, which is me now. And then we have the girl before the assault. All three of these story lines are running simultaneously.
KARIN: Did you have an outline?
I didn't outline it. I did go about four paces ahead of myself where I would scribble down what came next. I wasn't always right. But I did that because I was terrified that I would come to the edge of a cliff and then look down and not be sure where to go. I gave myself track at the end of every day, so that I wouldn't show up the next day and have to do anything other than keep going.
KARIN: Did you find it healing to write out this story?
LACY: I don't think the writing process was therapeutic. I do think the writing process was useful in that, for the first time, I told it exactly the way it felt true to me. Everything. I alienated a couple people along the way. I'm okay with that. It is what it is. I told it as truthfully as I could, with the evidence I have. And that's not something I had ever been given to do. Everyone around me had said, “No, you're wrong, it wasn't like that.” Or, “If it was like that, it was your own fault.” Or, you know, “These things happen all the time. Nobody cares.” Or any of a number of ways to dismiss the fact that I was the victim of a crime and the school covered it up. Full stop. That's what happened. If I had been carjacked on campus and the school covered it up, we'd be like, “What? What's going on up there?” But a girl is sexually assaulted and a school covers it up, and everyone's like, “Oh, it's complicated.” No, it's not complicated. It's really simple. That clarity was really helpful.
KARIN: Did you feel a kind of closure?
LACY: Closure is not my friend. There is a throwing off of shame, which is good. But there's this interesting thing that happens where people say, in a loving way, “You're so brave to tell this story.” It bothers me a little bit, and it bothers me that it bothers me. That's an ungenerous response to a generous comment. The reason it bothers me, I think, is because I don't know why it should be brave to describe having been the victim of a crime, multiple crimes in my case—not just the aggravated felonious sexual assaults, but also the obstruction of justice and witness tampering and also medical malpractice on the part of my boarding school. Why should it be brave to talk about those things? My college roommate got mugged at gunpoint. She told everyone who would listen. There's no shame in that. There's horror. There's trauma. There's fear. But no one says, “God, you're so brave to tell us that happened.”
KARIN: Why do you think people imagine it as brave?
LACY: Because we recognize the taboos about talking about sex and sexual assault and shame. Sexual assault has nothing to do with sex and nothing to do with desire. Certainly not on the part of the victim. It is a crime. What I keep bumping up against is this expectation that I'm not supposed to talk about this and it's brave that I am. I don't walk that line anymore. We should all talk about this all the time. Why not? I don't understand why we would contribute to the veiling of it, which is precisely what's used to keep us quiet, and make it more possible to victimize girls and young people in general. For me, I decided in some visceral way that I really don't care. I don't care to be ashamed. I'm not. I did the best I could. I was a good girl. I tried really hard. I was far from perfect. But I was a good person. I didn't deserve any of that. And that's not how I felt for a long time.
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To learn more about Lacy Crawford visit her site.
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