Know My Name: A Memoir

"It’s interesting because the testimony that became viral is an appendix to this book: it’s the last thing that you experience as a reader. I think that was a smart strategy, because it removes the notion of feeling that you already know the story. The memoir, Know My Name , is written in a very different kind of register. Obviously her statement was meant to be a public statement. She wanted to be heard not just by Brock Turner, but also anybody who has been a victim of sexual assault. “What’s really remarkable to me about Know My Name is the depth of self-interrogation that Chanel Miller does throughout this book” What’s really remarkable to me about Know My Name is the depth of self-interrogation that Chanel Miller does throughout this book. There is a lot of questioning, because she is forced to do it. She’s forced to do it because of the questions that she is getting by Brock Turner’s defense lawyers, who are trying to cast aspersions on her. They’re trying to reframe her as an illegitimate person. They’re trying to reframe her as a liar. They’re trying to reframe her as part of a larger culture, that says that a woman who has been sexually assaulted was ‘asking for it’ in some way. She realizes that there are so many attempts to reframe her as a person that it is clear that she has had to work very, very hard emotionally, not just to understand her own feelings and emotions and experiences, but to find a way to articulate them that is clear. She has a very interesting story to tell—about not just that experience of the sexual assault, but the recovery from it. Her engagement in art, and in some ways the way that she was saved by art. I don’t know if the cover is different in the UK, but here it mimics the Japanese pottery style Kintsugi , which emphasizes the breaks in something as opposed to trying to cover them up, which is a wonderful metaphor for what she is doing. On the sheer level of being somebody who is writing about an experience as deeply and as thoroughly as one possibly can, I think Know My Name is an exemplar of the form. Absolutely. And I think there are all sorts of ways that that can be done successfully. I think one thing that is striking about Know My Name is that Miller has made a decision to shift the tone, from the anger of the victim statement—which is valuable and real and necessary—to a cooler register. Which is not to say that there are not flare-ups of anger, but I think she’s trying to be almost as impartial as she possibly can be in her understanding of the emotional chaos that she has been thrust into. We talked about fact checking. I feel like she must have done a remarkable amount of rigorous fact-checking on herself, because I think it really does show in terms of the depth of understanding that she presents about her experience. We will know the winner on March 12th, 2020, which is when the board will present its awards in New York City. All the 24 members of the NBCC board are broken up into committees to select finalists in each of the six categories. Now, all 24 board members are charged with reading all the finalists, and then reconvening. So there are a lot of people who have not experienced any of these books until now. I think that’s exciting, because sometimes—and this happens with me when I see other categories that I didn’t sit in on the committees for—there are always titles completely unfamiliar to me, and they might go on to become some of my favorite books. I think that’s something that people appreciate about the NBCC awards: that they often throw a few curveballs out there. I’m thinking about books like Good Talk , which maybe didn’t get as much of an audience as it perhaps should have when it came out, and Sounds Like Titanic, which didn’t get much review attention at all. What’s great about this process is that we’re very open-ended about what we invite in to discuss, and sometimes the things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to spring up find a way of doing so."