Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

"The other book I thought was truly extraordinary was Tarana Burke’s Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement. Burke is the activist and community organizer who coined the phrase ‘Me Too’ while working with Black women and girls to heal from sexual assault. Her book tells the story of how she came to the key insight of that work: you can’t empathize with others unless you empathize with yourself. She writes: “if unkindness is indeed a serial killer, then my revelation is that I was my own murderer.” She describes how she was only able to help others effectively after she opened up to them about also having been a victim. That way, the women she talked with knew they were not alone, and they could see that she had survived, which gave them hope. Burke writes about having been sexually assaulted by an older boy in her neighborhood when she was 12. She didn’t tell anyone and very quickly internalized it as something bad that happened to her because she was bad. The main focus of the book is her relationships to other women: women who let her down by protecting men who sexually assaulted girls and women, and the women she let down, as a teenager, by being cruel and even violent towards them, and as an adult, by not yet being able to hear their stories. A pivotal moment in her account describes a girl in a program for young leaders telling Burke that she was assaulted. Burke completely shuts down and can’t help her. This puts her on the path to realizing that if she can’t embrace what happened to her and face it instead of compartmentalizing it, she’ll never be able to help the people who matter to her. She writes, “I didn’t see my story as my gift, only as my shame.” She’s not glad that it happened, but she sees that having been assaulted enables her to connect to the many other women who’ve been assaulted, to help them heal and thrive. The book opens with the Me Too hashtag going viral, but it ends well before the Me Too movement takes off, around the time Burke moves to Philadelphia with her daughter. The arc of the story is not so much about what led to the Me Too movement but about what led Burke to the insights that undergird it. The key moment is when Burke finally experiences the pain of her assault. As is common with trauma, she didn’t fully experience it at the time, she just shut it away. Finally, as an adult, she takes a week to let herself collapse and dissolve: it’s like a nervous breakdown, but also like a religious conversion. She emerges from this harrowing experience with a new sense of purpose and a vision of what she has to do. Another arc of the book has to do with relationships between women, which Burke treats as even more central to feminist politics than women’s relationships to men. The very end of the story narrates her reconciliation with her mother. (A lot of the best celebrity memoirs of 2021 focus on parent-child relationships. That’s another thing you get from reading them: detailed accounts of family dynamics, which interest me as an avid reader of novels.) Tarana Burke’s mother was in many ways very supportive, but she was also controlling, and a strict disciplinarian who rarely made room for her daughter to talk about feelings or pain or anything imperfect. Life was about surviving and making sure you didn’t get in trouble. In the final pages of Unbound, Burke describes going with her mother to an event in her childhood neighborhood. While there, she sees the man who assaulted her. He doesn’t recognize her. She sits in the car with her mother—whom she has, at this point, finally told about what happened to her—and says, ‘I can’t believe he didn’t recognize me, this man who in many ways defined my life. Am I so meaningless that he can’t even see me?’ And her mother says: “’he didn’t recognize you because you turned out to be a smart, beautiful, accomplished woman despite him trying to take that from you.’” At this moment, Burke finally feels truly seen by her mother. One of Burke’s points throughout the book is that the violence men inflict on women drives a wedge between women, including between mothers and daughters. As the book ends, we see how all the work that Tarana Burke has done with others and on herself has finally allowed her and her mother to have a much better relationship."