Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life After Sexual Assault

This powerful, difficult collection of visceral but often exquisitely constructed essays focuses on the “day-to-day realities of trauma” and challenges even readers familiar with sexual violence narratives in their assumptions about what survivors need. Juliane Okot Bitek’s “Skinny Days,” for example, intersperses opening lines of administrative emails with recollections of an imagined conversation with her dead father, demonstrating how reminders of sexual trauma—she’d been date raped and abused by her husband—can be triggered by daily life. Several essays fit the survivor narrative of women reclaiming the ownership and strength of their bodies through physical activities such as kickboxing and hockey, or finding beauty in artistic pursuits. But others, such as Kai Cheng Thom’s “The Salvation in My Sickness,” harshly criticize what the author sees as the feminist culture-approved stereotype of the “good survivor” who performatively tells her story and pursues “getting better” in exchange for validation and care. Several essayists answer the question “What gets you through?” by writing frankly about coping strategies that range from intentional forgetting to kinky trauma reenactments to keeping silent. These thoughtful writers elevate resilience and endurance above a sanitized, oversimplified recovery narrative, and though the result can feel hard to read, it will speak deeply to readers open to understanding the complexity of trauma. [em](Apr.) [/em]