Denial: A Memoir of Terror

by Jessica Stern

Overview

In this powerful memoir, a terrorism expert and assault survivor shares a clear-eyed, elucidating study of the profound reverberations of trauma” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

One of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder, Jessica Stern knows what it is to live through horror. In this brave and astonishingly frank examination of her own unsolved rape at the age of fifteen, she investigates how the rape and its aftermath came to shape her future and her work.

The author of the New York Times Notable Book Terror in the Name of God, Stern brilliantly explores the nature of evil in an extraordinary volume that Louise Richardson, author of What Terrorists Want, calls, “Memorable, powerful and deeply courageous…a riveting read.”

“Denial is one of the most important books I have read in a decade. . . . Brave, life-changing, and gripping as a thriller. . . . A tour de force.” —Naomi Wolf

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062000118
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/18/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	324
File size:	708 KB

About the Author

Jessica Stern is a leading expert on terrorism and trauma. Stern is the coauthor with J. M. Berger of ISIS: The State of Terror and the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror and Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, selected by the New York Times as a notable book of the year. She has held fellowships awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Erikson Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a national fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a fellow of the World Economic Forum. Stern is a research professor at Boston University. Prior to teaching, she worked in government, serving on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff and as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

What People are Saying About This

Howard Gardner

“Jessica Stern has written a remarkable book, unlike any that I’ve read. This deeply personal and often painful reflection documents the costs of personal, familial, and community silence as well as the liberating effects of truthful testimony.”

Louise Richardson

“A memorable, powerful and deeply courageous book, DENIAL is also a riveting read... With devastating honesty [Stern] explores the impact of trauma on victims and those close to them, and the costs of denial for both.”

Naomi Wolf

“One of the most important books I have read in a decade….Brave, life changing and gripping as a thriller...A tour de force.”

Susanna Moore

“[A] harrowing memoir of a girl whom trauma has taught to distrust herself and who learns to live with the idea of her helplessness...an appeal to compassion and forgiveness, rather than a condemnation of the destructive impulses that haunt each of us.”

Eliza Griswold

“[Denial] will allow people into parts of themselves they didn’t ven knew they had. Parts full of rage, of terror, of pride in their own detachment... For anyone who has lived at proximity to violence, it is one of the most necessary accounts of our time.”

Bessel van der Kolk

“A masterpiece. A remarkable human journey from confusion and doubt to clarity and perspective.”

Edward R. Shapiro

“An unflinchingly courageous self-examination... riveting and brilliantly told story... The book will be illuminating for victims and survivors of trauma, those who work or live with them, family members with generational histories of trauma, and for those who care about how our histories shape our lives.”

Editorial Reviews

According to Stern, the curse of rape—which she strips to its root—is that it teaches you to feel less and less of the world around you. She has trained herself to be a sharp-eyed observer, capable of registering the subtlest gestures, the slightest shifts in emotion, but when it comes to confronting her own demons, she found herself saying, "I will feel about this later." Being "stern and hard" is so natural to her by now that a more human reaction—writing this incandescently honest book, for instance—"takes an act of will."
—The Washington Post

Marie Arana

…Ms. Stern's plainspoken and very raw account of why, long before 9/11, she was driven to study terrorism …It is possible to…consider Denial a profound human document without considering it a profound literary one. It lacks allusiveness and distance. It is hot to the touch in ways that are both memorable and disturbing.
—The New York Times

Dwight Garner

In this skillfully wrought, powerful study, a terrorism expert, national security adviser (The Ultimate Terrorists), and lecturer at Harvard, returns to a definitive episode of terror in her own early life and traces its grim, damaging ramifications. Having grown up in Concord, Mass., in 1973, Stern, then 15, and her sister, a year younger, were forcibly raped at gunpoint by an unknown intruder; when the police reopened the case in 2006, Stern was compelled to confront the devastating experience. The police initially tied the case to a local serial rapist, who served 18 years in prison before hanging himself. Stern's painful journey takes her back to the traumatic aftershocks of the rape, when she began to affect a “stern, hard” veneer not unlike the stiff-upper-lip approach to survival her own German-born Jewish father had assumed after his childhood years living through Nazi persecution. Covering up her deep-seated sense of shame with entrenched silence, Stern had a classic post-traumatic stress disorder—which she was only able to recognize after her own work interviewing terrorists. Stern's work is a strong, clear-eyed, elucidating study of the profound reverberations of trauma. (July)

Publishers Weekly

[A] stunningly brave book.

Elle

This month’s must-read nonfiction: terrorism expert Jessica Stern’s DENIAL: A Memoir of Terror which opens the decades-old file of a crime committed against Stern as a teen, launching her on a gutsy investigation into the ways in which trauma is perpetuated.

Vogue

…An intense and honest examination…DENIAL is a touching portrait of how the after affects of trauma can influence the personal and professional life of its victim.

Philadelphia Tribune

A masterpiece. A remarkable human journey from confusion and doubt to clarity and perspective.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk

Wonderfully compassionate, absorbing reading for anyone.

Booklist (starred review)

[Stern’s] commitment to introspection makes for a book that is memorably searing…

New York Times Book Review

[A] harrowing memoir of a girl whom trauma has taught to distrust herself and who learns to live with the idea of her helplessness...an appeal to compassion and forgiveness, rather than a condemnation of the destructive impulses that haunt each of us.

Susanna Moore

An unflinchingly courageous self-examination... riveting and brilliantly told story... The book will be illuminating for victims and survivors of trauma, those who work or live with them, family members with generational histories of trauma, and for those who care about how our histories shape our lives.

Edward R. Shapiro

[Denial] will allow people into parts of themselves they didn’t ven knew they had. Parts full of rage, of terror, of pride in their own detachment... For anyone who has lived at proximity to violence, it is one of the most necessary accounts of our time.

Eliza Griswold

Jessica Stern has written a remarkable book, unlike any that I’ve read. This deeply personal and often painful reflection documents the costs of personal, familial, and community silence as well as the liberating effects of truthful testimony.

Howard Gardner

DENIAL [is] a profound human document… it is hot to the touch in ways that are both memorable and disturbing.

New York Times

[An] eloquent, vital book. . .brilliant [and] indispensable.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

[Stern’s rapist] whose chaotic life and whose own probable victimization Stern reconstructs, caused her lifelong anguish. She doesn’t simply tell us so but shows us in shattered, artfully repetitive narration.

Boston Globe

One of the most important books I have read in a decade….Brave, life changing and gripping as a thriller...A tour de force.

Naomi Wolf

a compelling investigation into her own life, the life of the serial rapist who committed at least 44 similar crimes and the way trauma affects everyone it touches, sometimes in surprisingly positive ways.

Time magazine

[Denial is a] powerfully constructed memoir … [an] incandescently honest book…

Washington Post

An extraordinary memoir conveys Stern’s process of denial, dissociation, and healing in her dawning realization of intolerable truths.

Providence Journal

A memorable, powerful and deeply courageous book, DENIAL is also a riveting read... With devastating honesty [Stern] explores the impact of trauma on victims and those close to them, and the costs of denial for both.

Louise Richardson

[Denial is a] powerfully constructed memoir … [an] incandescently honest book…

Washington Post

"A masterpiece. A remarkable human journey from confusion and doubt to clarity and perspective."

Doctor - Bessel van der Kolk

"Wonderfully compassionate, absorbing reading for anyone."

Booklist

"a compelling investigation into her own life, the life of the serial rapist who committed at least 44 similar crimes and the way trauma affects everyone it touches, sometimes in surprisingly positive ways."

Time Magazine

Terrorism expert Stern (Law/Harvard Univ.; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, 2003, etc.) writes about her own experience as a target of terror. When the author was 15, she and her 14-year-old sister were raped, and the rapist was never caught. Forty years later, the case was reopened and the perpetrator, thought to have raped as many as 44 girls between the ages of nine and 19, was identified. Though he had died several years earlier, Stern felt the need to investigate him. Through her explorations, she found more than just a sense of who he was. She discovered explanations for her ability to maintain calm in moments of extreme danger, her tendency to experience enormous anxiety in normally nonthreatening situations and why she may have chosen her specific career path. Stern is just as revealing about deeply held family secrets, including revelations about her mother's early death, her father's childhood as a Holocaust survivor and the philandering of, and Stern's potential molestation by, her grandfather. Most moving is the author's contemplation of denial itself, and its effect of re-victimizing the victim. Though the narrative continually threatens to spiral into stream-of-consciousness ramblings, Stern always manages to hold it together, thus lending a sense of the floating dissociation she often feels while still holding the narrative together as a cohesive whole. She successfully unearths difficult emotional terrain without sinking into utter subjectivity and maintains an orderly progression without becoming clinical. A disturbing, captivating memoir. Author appearances in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C.

Kirkus Reviews