I knew his name before hers: Brock Turner.

In January 2015, Turner's name and image went viral after the then-Stanford student-athlete sexually assaulted an unconscious woman, who the media labeled "Emily Doe."

In the pre-#MeToo era, Turner's case became a cultural lightning rod when, in 2016, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months in county jail, of which he served three, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt.

At the time, I was incensed. Once again survivors watched in helpless horror as a perpetrator's actions were tacitly endorsed by both media and the law. He was a good kid, after all, an on-the-rise Olympic class swimmer lost to the impulses that plague young men leaving home for the first time.

Do we really want to risk ruining this young man's potential over an act we should put into the "boys-will-be-boys" bucket? My fury burned until it extinguished, transforming into a small piece of coal lodged somewhere in my stomach, housed atop a pile that continued to grow with each passing news cycle as stories with this same script fell again and again.

Once again I experienced the dull ache of hopelessness when it comes to living within a society that has no adequate solutions to deal with perpetrators of sexual violence. To say I forgot about Emily Doe is an understatement: Her name hadn't even entered my consciousness. There was no room inside my stomach for anything other than embers, soot, and flame.

That is until I picked up Know My Name: A Memoir.

I stand in awe of the humanity found within Chanel Miller's memoir. More than a simple re-telling of a familiar story, Miller's book is a work on par with the feminist theorists I read in graduate school. She places her experiences of sexual assault and its aftermath within a social, cultural, and historical patriarchal context: Where she must figure out how to maintain employment and relationships amidst grueling court dates, mass shootings, and everyday harassment from men on the street, to say nothing of the psychic and emotional wounds that follow survivors after a sexual assault.

Her prose possesses a poetry and frankness that encompasses the spectrum of emotions survivors experience: fury, dissociation, confusion, overwhelm, anxiety, fear, terror, pleasure, pain, and numbness. She's not asking readers to make space for her. She takes it freely.

It's not a true crime memoir (or not only): It's literature. I could feel the texture of her mother's crispy salmon skin dinners on my tongue. I felt the Rhode Island summer heavily weigh me down as she describes six-mile walks to nowhere.

I felt the need to throw my phone across the room in angry solidarity with her. The immersive quality of her daily experiences gives rich texture to her character, yes, but also the debilitating inescapability of violence she faces as a woman in the U.S. Where does the anger go?

The way Miller describes the fracturing violence of sexual assault finds form through the figure of Emily Doe. In the aftermath of violence, Miller houses Emily within a small glass jar deep inside herself, relegating her to darkness, so Miller can get up each day to bike to work, reassure her younger sister, and maintain a semblance of ongoingness.

Her survival strategy—dissociation—comes at a cost. Her anger and paranoia become global. She worries, for instance, that a kind older man offering her a snack at a bus stop must've rubbed the snack on his genitals before handing it to her.

She slams her phone on the floor when her boyfriend reminds her she has a phone call with an attorney in a few moments as if she could forget, the cracked phone glass threatening to splinter her thumb when she receives the call. These are moments when Emily unscrews the top of her glass cage, pining for recognition.

Miller eventually finds herself in therapy, which helps her feel lighter once the story is outside her body. But what can therapy—even effective therapy—do about the rest?

Institutional Betrayal

Miller's memoir deftly articulates what Jennifer Freyd calls "institutional betrayal," that is, the ways institutions meant to mete our justice end up traumatizing the individuals they're meant to serve. Freyd's theory of institutional betrayal challenges conventional therapeutic ways of knowing that insist it's the individual's responsibility to heal, integrate, and reenter society in the aftermath of violence.

As Freyd says in her book, Betrayal Trauma, “[W]hen the goal of therapy is reintegration into society, the assumption is that it is the individual who must adapt, and the society that is healthy” (Freyd 171). Freyd points to the ways that the therapeutic environment can even collude with normative power structures outside the therapy office to reinforce oppression and victimization when therapists ignore, downplay, or reinforce racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., within their offices.

Freyd encourages readers to remain skeptical of therapeutic practices whose central goal is to have the patient integrate their parts without addressing systemic forms of oppression outside the therapy office. Freyd states that dissociation becomes the minimal survival strategy for marginalized patients hoping to go on. She writes:

Unawareness, not knowing, forgetting, dissociating—being less than fully connected internally—may be adaptive if the external situation is such that awareness, knowing, remembering, and integrating would be life-threatening.

We see this happen when Miller sends her boyfriend a video of a man following her on the street. Her boyfriend asks her not to send him any more videos like this due to the emotional strain it places on him. Miller's boyfriend is here colluding with his own unawareness and desire to not-know about these daily forms of intimidation women face.

Dissociation is not only a survival strategy for victims: Those with privilege in our society are also invested in their unawareness to escape painful realities, even realities that aren't life-threatening.

Miller's memoir stands as a refusal to not-know, a refusal of dissociation in the face of institutional oppression. Thankfully, Miller has supportive family, friends, and past relationships to help her deal with the violent invasion she experienced from Turner.

Those of us without such positive relational models will find a roadmap of sorts to feel with Miller what safety feels like. She describes the folds of necks and fingers and how they intertwine without becoming tangled with such a delicate warmth that, for a moment, this reader got the chance to experience secure attachment.

Her ability to capture what safe touch and relating feels like can help readers who haven't had those same experiences figure out what kinds of touch they're after. Miller gave me permission to access my split-off parts that are hot to the touch—rage, anger, terror, yes, but also desire for closeness, warmth, and safety—because she's so fully willing to experience those parts of herself without shame.

Know My Name: A Memoir is a must-read for anyone brave enough to refuse not-knowing.