Denial: a memoir of terror, written by Jessica Stern- experienced by Jessica Stern- talks mostly of Concord, Massachusetts and areas around it. It starts in the first couple chapters at the night that changed everything for her and her younger sister. They were then 15 and 14. It was October of ’73 and in Concord nobody thought anything like this could happen. Afterwards, speaking with police, even the police didn’t believe them, until the doctor’s examinations. It was covered up like something bad- which, it is something horrible, but while it is horrible it should still be spread so parents protect their children. She talks a little of school, but mostly just of what happened in her personal life. There’s a part where she speaks of the women her father was with after her mother died of cancer- though later she questions whether it was the cancer that killed her or the high levels of radiation her maternal grandfather used to try and treat the cancer. Her father married one, Lisa as she calls her though she is using different names to protect the people she knows, a year after her mothers death and that marriage lasted 6 years- they continued to live with her for 2 years until she started her own family and then they lived with their, single, father.

In the book, she speaks of her father a lot- both the good and the bad things. There’s one passage that reads, “When our family physician called our father to tell him his two girls had been raped at gunpoint, he did not curtail his trip. He did not come home to us right away.” Why would a father not come straight home to his two young (though not very young- teenage) girls when a significant event has happened- a traumatic event? She actually asks him a similar question later on, however she is a lot more factual- crisp, unemotional- about it than I was writing that one. His answer- or perhaps just his reasoning- was, “The most important thing I can say about why I didn’t come back is that I felt that we were estranged. I felt that I couldn’t help you… I remember thinking, There is no point in rushing home because you [Jessica] will reject me in any case. You still wouldn’t talk to me.” At this same point as he reasons about why he didn’t come home, she writes on needing to feel like she could speak about it. “He wanted me to talk to him, but I couldn’t talk unless he made it clear that he wanted to listen. I needed his permission to feel, and that permission wasn’t granted.”

Within Denial, she also speaks of the research. She researched for a long while into who her and her sister’s rapist was. She looked at the police reports her and her sister filled out the night of October 1 st , 1973 and slowly made her way through them. She found many others similar, many that happened around the same time (9 o’clock-ish) and in the same area. She found one that happened right after her and her sister’s in which the girl committed suicide afterwards. During this research part- which covered just about half the book- she wrote, “I will feel about this later,” a lot, as if she could turn off her emotions, which speaks volumes when paired with the fogginess of the brain she talked about while speaking the people who used to be friends- or, at points, lovers- of her rapist’s. She talks of speaking with these friends and some outright denying that he would ever do anything so violent. One of the first people she speaks with, whom she calls Henry- the uncle of her rapist’s daughter, actually- is a “denyer”. He says, outright, “I didn’t like Beat, but I think he was falsely accused. I don’t believe he raped anyone. He was smart. He was brilliant. He could have done anything.” Another, John Henry as she calls him, said, “He wasn’t mean the way I picture rapists… I would say he was disturbed,” but that was before she told him why she tracked him down and was speaking him- that she suspects Brian Beat raped her. Afterwards he said, “I didn’t know that!” in an ashamed, apologetic tone and they spoke.

She wrote a lot on Beat, questioning if he experienced trauma and that was why he was the way he was. She got bits and pieces on him from the “friends” and his ex-lover- Henry’s younger sister. There are bits speaking of the church and the school he went to and that three of the priest’s were pedophiles. One of the times she writes of this is around page 186 when she writes of the interview-like chat with Skip, a guy who went to the same school, the same church, as Beat- a guy who, like is suspected of Beat, was sexually abused by a priest. Three to be exact.

However, getting from individual issues and topics to the large one she meant the book to be about. Or, that I guess she meant for it to be about. It is called a memoir of terror, so I would guess the basis of the book is about terror. It is to tell others of it and to let others suffering because of trauma know that they are not alone and that there is a way out of this constant switch between hypervigilance- an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity in which one may pay better attention to detail, as Stern speaks of, and which has the purpose of detecting threats- and hypovigilance- connected usually to being aware more of sounds and the sense of an emotion or a physical pain. Fogginess is what Stern connects it to, as well as sleepiness.

Along with this, I think the reason, besides to just get it out there, was to relieve herself of some sort of burden also. In the end, she writes of her and her father sitting down. They sit and they talk of his past and her rape along with the book. It’s a sort of apology, meant to also clear the air, sort their problems out, and start over.

To move on… my 8 passages may be quite disturbing, but then, I read this memoir and it was very disturbing, so it only fits that what I quote will be. They will help me connect this to psychology, however, so I’ll get on with that.

(Pages 4 and 5) “Later, he took me to the seaside, to a tidal pool that you could swim in, with narrow openings to the sea on either side. The pool was pristine- constantly washed by the shifting tides. And in that pool were tiny jellyfish. They didn’t sting, but they slipped against your body like a hundred flaccid penises. No pain other than the agony of disgust. Eventually, it was more than I could bear, the terror of surreally soft flesh sliding against my unprotected skin.”

This one made me question. After this she speaks of her grandfather, before it she spoke of his boat and how they would go out on it in the summers. Later she speaks of a couple occurrences. It makes me wonder if he did something, something prior to her rape, that could explain why she was passive and rational at a time when she should have been in hysterics. This is one of the passages that impacted me the most, however I will not be reading it aloud. It is not the “dirty” word within it, but more the fact that I may actually freeze up it disgusts and disturbs me so much. This was within the first chapter of the book. I told my family as I was reading it that if they ever read it, if anyone else ever read it- that if they could get past the first 40 pages they could read anything, and definitely finish the rest of the book. I had to set down the book a lot during that period of pages- sometimes I would stop for as long as a week and I would read something more innocent, a fictional love story or something, then come back. Those difficult 40 pages are where most of my passages will come from. Here is the next one.

(Page 20) “-entered me while I was sitting. –told me it didn’t hurt—he was sterile and clean. Two times. –I said it hurt. –he said it didn’t. I do remember the hurt, as if someone had inserted a gun made of granite that scraped my flesh raw, at first scratching, the tearing, then scraping the flesh off bone, leaving the bone sterilized by pain.”

Despite how long it took me to get through the section that had this passage in it, it was not a long section. It started on page sixteen and ended on twenty-four, only eight pages long, and yet- it took me probably two weeks of very short intervals of reading to get through it. I can’t say I really reacted, or am reacting, in any particular way other than being disgusted and disturbed, but one would think reading something like this, that you’d at least cry or be angry. Yes, this act that Beat did angers me, it saddens me too, but I didn’t react in any way to show that. I read it, set it down, picked it back up and repeated that until I finally got past that. Strangely, I’ve chosen to not count where she italicizes and uses her sister’s writing as part of that section. Funnily enough, the only parts that really dug deep were the parts where she was reacting and where she was quoting herself or italicizing her words, no one else’s.

(Page 52) “Once we find the rapist, I plan to talk to him. I plan to look him straight in the eye. That is as far as my planning goes.”

This one caught me very off-guard. Why would you want to speak to your rapist? But then I looked at it from her perspective- her background is in terrorists and terrorism, speaking with individual terrorists to see if there is a common reason why they terrorize others- and found it to be pretty natural for her to want to speak with someone who terrorized her, to, perhaps, find out why he would terrorize her and other little girls. Or perhaps she wanted to know his past, other things that she could not get from his friends and lovers. It still shocks me, however, that somebody so affected by both the rape and anything afterwards would want to speak with her rapist. If anything, I would think she’d want to see him killed, but she is not the violent type… well, not usually. Not physically, mentally, with thoughts, perhaps, but not in any way that anyone can ever see. Either way, on to the next passage.

Right, before I type this next passage up, I’ll give you a little of the pages before it. She writes of her reading a letter between an MD and the prison Beat was at, at that point in time. It was a letter speaking of the psychiatric examination that Beat underwent at the request of what I would say would be some sort of head of police or of the prison. Her reaction that she writes is one of the only times I can actually read emotion in her words rather than just her stating what happened.

(Page 151) “Can a trained psychiatrist really assume that a rapist with a gun in his hand could have “sex relations” with a young girl under threat of harm and still “hurt her in no way”? How can he repeat the petrified girl’s use of the word gentle? What does the doctor mean when he says the rapist “hurt” her in no way? Does he conclude that, because Beat did not tear his victim’s eyes out, did not bloody her limbs or break her bones, that he did not hurt her?”

After this she goes into some mental violence at the psychiatrist’s expense. Amazingly, the mental violence disturbed me less than the psychiatrist’s write-up, or whatever you would like to call it. To quote the book, and thereby quoting her, “ ‘Sex relations,’ he writes! As if it were an unremarkable occurrence that a masked man with a gun would have “sex relations” with a girl.” Somehow this doctor that wrote the letter, and a second doctor, found Beat not a “sexually dangerous person”. How could a psychiatrist “not appear to question the guilty verdict” yet not find the person dangerous? This section of the book, a very small one- only about three pages long- confused me quite a bit. It left me questioning whether psychiatrists and other doctors alike always make the right decision, which in turn landed me at my own personal conclusion that no, they do not. They may make the “correct” decision, but that decision is not always the right one.

(Page 188) “ ‘In our house, priests were next to God. I assumed no one would believe me.’… The state has taken Billing off the street. The church has forbidden him from preaching. But the church apparently does not view the sexual abuse of children as a sin sufficiently serious to warrant excommunication. These are the crimes that the church considers to be the most serious sins: Attempting to absolve a person who has committed adultery. Acquiring an abortion. Violating the confidentiality of confession. Physically harming the pope. But not repeatedly persuading a child that allowing himself to be sodomized by a priest is an act of love.”

Obviously, it is not still that way, right? They couldn’t possibly think that adultery is still higher on the list of serious sins than a priest- who is supposed to be your safe haven, your confidant- raping a young boy countless times over and convincing him that it is not wrong? How could a person do such a thing to a child, and- just so they don’t have to face the fact that what they are doing is wrong, just so they don’t have to see the affect it’s having on their victim- making certain that that child thinks it is not wrong, that it is good of them to do that?

(Page 206) “I sense confusion. There is a silence, but also a rustling, as people shift their bodies. They are uncomfortable with what they couldn’t quite hear. Maybe they are trying to get a grip on the meaning of the words they heard…. I tell them about the forty-four known victims, all between the ages of nine and nineteen years old. I tell them that twenty of the victims had been living in the eight-block area centered on the Radcliffe dorms.”

Forty-four victims. Known victims. How many are there that are unknown victims? That are quietly ashamed and so they have not told? How many will never be known- are there any that are unknown, but are known criminals, even sexual predators? I guess this is less a reaction and more an analysis, but this analysis is how I react. Maybe I should call them survivors instead of victims- she makes very clear that she does not like the term victim, many times.

(Page 211) “And she tells me about the rapist’s piercing blue eyes, which she says she will never forget.”

I read this, and I read it again, and now I read it again. The first time, I could swear I could imagine them, though I realize I will never be able to- this is their nightmare, not mine and I will never, hopefully, know what it is like. The idea that something so small could be so painful, so intense, seems insane when I don’t think of it first. But then I think about it- and I think of the things I write about, for awareness purposes- and it makes sense. A sick kind of sense, but it makes sense.

(Page 273) “Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before or what comes afterward.”

I think some of this rubbed off on me. I wrote this in a very disjointed fashion. It flows like the book does, fitting yet not fitting. This is where I will lead into the connection to psychology… or just dive in.

This whole book connects to Freud’s defense mechanisms and thought that any present issues are because of past traumas. The soldier she speaks to and the other raped or the abused that have nightmares still. She doesn’t speak of any dreams for herself personally except about earlier in her years- she speaks more for others. When reality becomes too much we either repress, regress, project, displace, or rationalize.

Along with this, we learned of disorders. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the most prominent, and most likely the only, disorder present in this book. She speaks of it in the postscript at the end. “It is important to point out that no two victims of trauma will have precisely the same symptoms. But some symptoms are common among people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. One is…” and she goes on speaking of the commonalities. One she spoke of was difficulty accepting love, another difficulty trusting others to care for you. A couple others are the sensations of numbness, and the difficulty recognizing fear. Many have triggers- sounds, smells, sights that will trigger memories of the trauma- but those are individual. Hers’, I found while reading, or one of hers’, was grease. Greasy hands; slick, dirty hands, alarmed her. Two states connected to this disorder are hypervigilance and hypovigilance- opposites of each other that you can probably figure out on your own, that I spoke of earlier.

As far as my opinion of the book goes… reading it was like most of psychology: difficult, but intriguing at the same time. I still wonder how I got through it, but at the same time I know how I did. It was interesting, it didn’t bore me. The terror that I felt in the words as I read it, the disgust and the disturbing events, thoughts and specific words were not over-powering. If you were to ask me if I recommend you read it, I’d say “If you think you can handle it, go ahead,” because it is difficult to read, but it is a very good book. Jessica Stern makes you think, the way she wrote this, because of how she lined it up- though I realize she probably didn’t mean for it to all be placed like this. It worked out in a way that has you questioning and wondering, along with the initial disgust and pain at thinking of what she went through.

I enjoyed the book, I guess, even if I should be saying I absolutely hated it, but I will put it this way: I can’t imagine anyone ever liking the subject, because child rape is something no one ever wants to think about happening, but it does happen and so I’m glad there are many books out there for those that need to know there are others out there like them. Maybe this is because it comes from the point of view of someone who writes awareness pieces, or maybe I’m just thinking in an odd way because I’m strange. Either way, I enjoyed the book even if the subject of it makes me anxious and agitated.