Telling

In this intimate memoir, Patricia Weaver Francisco tells of her fifteen-year journey to recognize and overcome the effects of a violent rape. Francisco explores key aspects of a woman's life in the aftermath of rape - passion, marriage, solitude, childbirth, motherhood. She invites the reader into her life and into the questions raised by a crime with no obvious solutions or easy answers. We see the dimensions of a human struggle often kept hidden from view. While there are an estimated twelve million rape survivors in the United States, rape is still unspeakable, left out of our personal and cultural conversation. In Telling, Francisco has found a language for the secret grief carried by men and women who have survived rape. A compelling and important book, Telling will start the conversations that can bring hope and healing to the women who need it, and to their loved ones trying to help them.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Mental Health. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.