What a Body Remembers

One woman's account of a harrowing attack in Berkeley, California, and its aftermath. In 1984, Stefano (The Secret Games of Words, 2015) was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. She had no luck joining a sorority, although she soon found an intriguing vocation: campus police aide, which involved "patrolling campus and surrounding neighborhoods, calling in suspicious activity." She saw some unusual things in her time on the job, such as when she directed traffic (including stoned attendees on foot) at a Grateful Dead concert. One night, after leaving work, she was walking home alone and about to enter her apartment when she was threatened by a man with a knife. The attacker pinned her from behind, put his hand over her mouth, and pressed himself against her; he brought the knife up to her throat, but she managed to scream, and he fled. Although the author wasn't physically injured, the book ably examines the many aftereffects of such an ordeal. She writes of a useless on-campus counseling session with a graduate student and of an unfriendly court system. Later in life, the author became a defense attorney and found herself arguing in court on behalf of people who were accused of crimes not unlike her attacker's and grilling victims not unlike herself. The book clearly illustrates how life continues after one's trauma and how strange, unexpected things can happen, as when the author saw her attacker in a grocery store later the same summer; stunned, she thought, "Attackers have to eat too." The book loses some of its focus in later chapters; for example, regarding a return visit to Berkeley in 2014, she mentions some rather obvious ways that the city had changed (back in 1984, she notes, "No one blogged....There were no paninis, just sandwiches"). Still, later portions yield some potent material. What happened to the man with the knife? The answer, provided here, is chilling. An honest, nuanced look at what it means to carry on after a traumatic event.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)