Reviews of TELLING
From KIRKUS REVIEWS, January 1, 1999
** STARRED REVIEW **
A poetic, searingly personal book about a subject much of society would prefer to ignore.
Francisco was a happily married 20-something writer and assistant editor when a rapist entered her apartment while her husband was away and brutally raped her. The act itself only took moments (although he spent several hours mentally torturing her), but her recovery took years. Novelist Francisco (Cold Feet, 1988, etc.) chronicles that recovery here in a book that is personal and yet universal enough to offer hope to others who have faced similar trauma. Francisco has an enviable feel for language. Her prose is by turns subtle and shockingly direct, just as rape itself is simultaneously blunt and violent and an insidious spiritual attack whose wounds fester internally long after the actual act has been committed. Francisco chillingly chronicles the act itself and the various methods she used to cope. "My most deeply held belief about my experience of rape is that by telling, I saved my life," she writes. "I had a small chance and it arrived like an opening in traffic. I knew exactly what to do with it. Tell. Talk about yourself. Spill it" Unafraid to bare her soul as a writer as well, Francisco walks the reader through the failure of her marriage (80 percent of marriages involving a rape victim fail, one counselor tells her) to her slow, painful reawakening to her self and life through a variety of therapies, including body treatments such as massage and energy work. "I've come to believe that the body's memory is as deep and unacknowledged as our dreams. Both fall outside language, their messages carried in image and sensation."
Francisco is not afraid to tell. We all must be brave enough to listen.
From Publishers Weekly, January 11, 1999
** STARRED REVIEW **
"Telling requires a kind of courage that I normally lack. This book is an exertion, a promise I'm keeping, and it's slow going." ...Her memoir is deliberately self-conscious in its revelations of what happened, it its exploration of emotion and in its construction of meaning. And it works, because Francisco's method is appropriate to the larger argument that animates the memoir: that, while telling is excruciating, silence is poison. In 1981, while her husband, Tim, was in Vermont, an intruder broke into her Minneapolis home and raped her. Francisco underwent counseling and received a great deal of love and support from both Tim and her friends. However, despite her best efforts to carry on with her life, she found that she was unable to recover completely from the trauma. She now attributes the difficult labor she endured four years later while giving birth to her son to a suppressed physiological memory of the rape. She also feels that her ordeal placed a stress on her and Tim that contributed to their subsequent divorce. In order to complete her recovery, Francisco needed to publicly acknowledge what happened to her. So she attended several Minnesota rape trials and participated in the Silent Witness project, which publicizes cases of women killed in domestic violence. In this fierce book, she strikes a balance between the subjectivity of memoir and an eloquent argument that society must look sexual assault in the face before it can be stopped.
