At just 15, Lacy Crawford is sexually assaulted by two older boys at the New England boarding school that she attends. Notes on a Silencing is Crawford’s memoir of how this event impacted her life in the short term, but also how this event was part of a much more insidious instance of coverups at the prestigious school.

…it took a very long time to find the right name for what happened to me. I was too stunned to think rape when I pleaded with them not to have sex with me, though rape, in the traditional sense, was precisely what I meant to avoid. I had been raised to believe that by every metric, the most serious thing a girl could do was have a penis in her vagina. Not even Mary the mother of Jesus had done that. Certainly I had not. It had not occurred to me what else these two boys might do.

The memoir begins with the heinous assault and then invites the reader into Crawford’s life at St. Paul’s before this event. In many ways, Crawford was a typical teenager: studious, athletic, awkward and graceful in equal measure. Like many teenagers, Crawford is looking for a way to belong and longs to be both appealing and invisible to the opposite sex. After the assault, though, an event which she keeps to herself, Crawford is overcome with anxiety. She believes that what happened to her is her fault and many of the decisions she made in the following months lead to more emotional damage.

As much as Notes on a Silencing is about this one event and its aftermath, this is also the story of one girl’s journey through the land-mined path from adolescence to adulthood. It is about the casual cruelty girls often sling at each other, and the small kindnesses people can extend especially when you least expect them to. It is also very much about institutional abuse, even more appalling in this case because St. Paul’s is a well-respected religious school that prides itself on turning out graduates headed for the Ivy League. Crawford was failed over and over.

Twenty-five years after Crawford’s graduation from St. Paul’s, she reads about another assault on campus. There is a plea for information and Crawford tells her story. She is contacted by detectives and her case is added to what turns out to be many cases of sexual assault which were covered up on the campus. I’d love to say that Crawford gets her day in court, but that’s not what happens.

It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time.

First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent.

Notes on a Silencing is a powerful, frustrating, devastating and beautifully written story about one girl’s experience which will speak to every single woman out there.

Highly recommended.