Know My Name: A Memoir

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars | 17,240 ratings

Price: 19.69

Last update: 08-01-2024


Top reviews from the United States

Christine Liu
5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading for every human being on the planet
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2021
This is such an incredible book that for the first time ever, I wish I could give a book six stars because five isn’t sufficient. Or downgrade all the other ratings I've ever given and say, "No, this one. This is the actual five star book." No other book has ever made me feel so intensely so empathize so completely with my entire being. It infuriated me, empowered me, made me want to clutch the book to my chest and sob for the injustices that victims of sexual assault are made to suffer again and again while our systems, society, and culture protect those who do the assaulting. I wish I could make everyone read this beautiful, luminous, powerful book. It should be required reading for every high school student in the US. It should be required reading for every human being on the planet.

Know My Name is Chanel Miller's memoir about the night she was sexually assaulted behind a dumpster while attending a fraternity party at Stanford, about waking up in the hospital to medical staff and police telling her only fragments of the hours missing from her memory, about learning how to live her life in the aftermath while the subsequent investigation and trial dragged on for years, about reliving the worst moment of her life while her rapist’s friends, family, and defense team launched assault after assault on her character and her decisions, about fighting to bring about institutional change in the way Stanford handles campus assault. This is a book about trauma, shame, healing, survival, rape culture, class privilege, and what it’s like to be a woman.

In one part of the book, she says that the man who assaulted her will be known as "swimmer turned rapist" while she will be known as "the victim who wrote a book". Chanel Miller is a brilliant, thoughtful, funny, incandescent human being who has so much strength and compassion and humanity. She is quite possibly one of the most gifted writers of this generation. What happened to her doesn't define her. She doesn't need anyone's pity. She's going to achieve tremendous, magnificent things with her unforgettable voice, and I feel very lucky that I'm going to get to see it as it happens.
Glady
5.0 out of 5 stars Searing Memoir
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2020
I am in awe. Chanel Miller has taken one of the most horrific events anyone might experience and used it to expose the failings of the justice system, the casual way in which responsibility for sexual assault is thrust upon the victim, and the power of love and kindness.

Miller drank too much at a frat party and blacked out. But her dumb behavior should not be - cannot be - is not, the reason Chanel ends up behind a dumpster with her dress pulled up, her panties gone, her legs akimbo. The reason for Miller's rape solely lies with her attacker, Brock Turner, who was quickly caught by two passing bicyclists. Miller's account of the hospital exam with all of its indignities is tempered by the gentleness and kindness of those who care for her. Despite their compassion and professionalism, Miller's experience is gut-wrenching to read. She does not yet know that the horror is just beginning.

Powerfully, Miller exposes the wide-ranging effects, the tentacles of despair, that encircle her, her family, her boyfriend, and her friends. She is most protective of her younger sister, Tiffany, who attended the frat party with her. But the nightmare does not just last a single night. Miller takes a step forward and two back, appears to be healing and accepting and then finds herself unable to get out of bed or keep a job. The trial is often delayed and the publicity is ruthless. As Miller writes, "they [commenters on news articles] seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability."

Miller effectively takes events from her past and describes their effects on her present self. As a high school student, Miller's fellow students were part of a suicide cluster. Such clusters are often studied and their foundations sought, but Miller manages to describe the emotional weight of the suicides on the students. It is not a weight that is removed at graduation. Readers will share her horror and terror as she huddles with friends while a school shooter, Elliot Rodger, justifies his murders because women didn't pay attention to him, didn't provide him with the sex he believed he deserved. More weight to be carried.

Gradually, Miller realizes she is not alone; unfortunately there are legions of women who share her experience. Here is where Miller shines. Her honest, articulate voice, cracking with pain, gives strength to others.
"When society questions a victim’s reluctance to report, I will be here to remind you that you ask us to sacrifice our sanity to fight outdated structures that were designed to keep us down. Victims do not have the time for this. Victims are also students, teachers, parents, who can’t give up work or education. The average adult can barely find time to renew their license at the DMV."

"This is not about the victims’ lack of effort. This is about society’s failure to have systems in place in which victims feel there’s a probable chance of achieving safety, justice, and restoration rather than being retraumatized, publicly shamed, psychologically tormented, and verbally mauled."

We need to take on the pain, the weight, the inequity of the system. We need to be completely intolerant of the jokes, the half-truths, the assumptions. Give this book to your daughters and your sons.

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