What a Body Remembers: A Memoir of Sexual Assault and Its Aftermath

by Karen Stefano

Overview

On a summer night in 1984, nineteen-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul-chilling struggle, she manages to escape.

Though she is left traumatized by her assault and the subsequent trial of her attacker, she herself goes on to become a criminal defense lawyer, defending those accused of crimes as heinous as the one committed against her.

Fast forward to 2014, thirty years after her assault, when her life, once again, appears to be crumbling. As she stumbles her way through the days navigating a dying marriage, devastating financial loss, and an elderly mother slipping into dementia, she becomes fascinated by her own anxiety and PTSD. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget? Her questions prompt a delayed obsession with her assailant: What became of him? What is he doing now? She begins a quest of excavation, determined to track him down.

What she discovers is life altering.

What A Body Remembers is an honest, from-the-gut account of one woman’s journey to regain her power and confidence—a journey that continues to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947856950
Publisher:	Rare Bird Books
Publication date:	06/11/2019
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Karen Stefano is the author of the forthcoming memoir, What A Body Remembers (Rare Bird Books 2019). She is the author of the short story collection The Secret Games of Words (1GlimpsePress 2015) and the how-to business writing guide, Before Hitting Send (Dearborn 2011). Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, California Lawyer, Psychology Today, The South Carolina Review, Tampa Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She is also a JD/MBA with more than twenty years of complex litigation experience. To learn more about Karen and her writing, please visit http://stefanokaren.com.

Editorial Reviews

"Why can't she get over it?" "Why can't she just move on?" Karen Stefano will make you understand exactly why. In this taut, riveting memoir Stefano brings you into the life of a woman in the wake of a violent assault. Tortured by what-ifs and the terrifying awareness of her own vulnerability, Stefano becomes obsessed with knowing all she can about the compounding forces that create her "habit of fear." Arresting, compelling, her journey culminates in an unexpected grace that strangely blooms out of that awful assault. This story is necessary and unforgettable—and arrives at just the right time."
—Samantha Dunn, author of Not By Accident

"Karen Stefano's What A Body Remembers is a gripping, upending thing of beauty. Her memoir serves as a battle cry for our times—a voice for women who have lived through an assault—taking the reader along the jagged path to healing to the shock of tracking down the assailant to the truth her body carried all along. Profound, courageous, and deeply validating."
—Susan Henderson, bestselling author of The Flicker of Old Dreams and Up from the Blue



"An honest, nuanced look at what it means to carry on after a traumatic event."
—Kirkus

"Stefano's memoir is raw and wrenching, but her solid, candid writing invites readers into this testament to her experience."
—Shelf Awareness

"What A Body Remembers is a gut-wrenching walk back into a terrifying past in order to find peace with with tomorrow. This is a harrowing but ultimately transformative story about reclaiming the events that have shaped our lives—even the traumatic ones. Karen Stefano writes with verve and delicacy, as well as astonishing honesty. Read this book!"—Rene Denfeld, internationally bestselling author of The Child Finder

"After her superb debut book, The Secret Games of Words, Karen Stefano returns with What a Body Remembers—her autobiographic account of sexual assault, frustratingly unsatisfactory legal maneuvering, and a lifetime of reverberations from both—all leading to a decades later heart stopping discovery. Stefano’s writing style accessibly conveys the complex challenges in coping with trauma in her life’s journey: from victim to survivor to successful lawyer and author. Highly recommended."
—Charles M. Sevilla, author of Wilkes on Trial and Wilkes, His Life and Crimes

"Stefano’s stunning What A Body Remembers illuminates the fuzzy memory of terror into concise forensic clarity, and it leaps into prose like a great revenge song."
—Antonia Crane, author of the memoir Spent

From the Publisher

2020-02-08
One woman’s account of a harrowing attack in Berkeley, California, and its aftermath.

In 1984, Stefano (The Secret Games of Words, 2015) was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. She had no luck joining a sorority, although she soon found an intriguing vocation: campus police aide, which involved “patrolling campus and surrounding neighborhoods, calling in suspicious activity.” She saw some unusual things in her time on the job, such as when she directed traffic (including stoned attendees on foot) at a Grateful Dead concert. One night, after leaving work, she was walking home alone and about to enter her apartment when she was threatened by a man with a knife. The attacker pinned her from behind, put his hand over her mouth, and pressed himself against her; he brought the knife up to her throat, but she managed to scream, and he fled. Although the author wasn’t physically injured, the book ably examines the many aftereffects of such an ordeal. She writes of a useless on-campus counseling session with a graduate student and of an unfriendly court system. Later in life, the author became a defense attorney and found herself arguing in court on behalf of people who were accused of crimes not unlike her attacker’s and grilling victims not unlike herself. The book clearly illustrates how life continues after one’s trauma and how strange, unexpected things can happen, as when the author saw her attacker in a grocery store later the same summer; stunned, she thought, “Attackers have to eat too.” The book loses some of its focus in later chapters; for example, regarding a return visit to Berkeley in 2014, she mentions some rather obvious ways that the city had changed (back in 1984, she notes, “No one blogged….There were no paninis, just sandwiches”). Still, later portions yield some potent material. What happened to the man with the knife? The answer, provided here, is chilling.

An honest, nuanced look at what it means to carry on after a traumatic event.

Kirkus Reviews