In this memoir a woman interviews the boy who raped her in high school. It’s very interesting, as while we have all read many accounts of what it is like to be raped, I can hardly think of any accounts of what it’s like to be a rapist.
This guy was her good friend in high school. One night when she was back home from college, she got drunk with some of her high school friends. She was taken down to his basement room to sleep it off. Once there he took her clothes off, fingered her, and then masturbated over her, all the while murmuring about how she shouldn’t worry and it was all a dream. She cried throughout.
A few days later he called her to apologize. She said it was okay and said he should red FRANNY AND ZOOEY, which was one of her favourite novels at that time. She then didn’t speak to him for the next fifteen years.
The book is structured around her decision to try and write about this event, and the series of phone calls she had with her rapist about how he thought about that night. Remarkably, despite the fact that the statue of limitations has not run out on the offense, he agrees to talk to her. It appears that the event has troubled him for years, and particularly he is haunted by the sound of her crying. However, unsatisfyingly, he can’t really say why he did it, other than that he wanted to.
He’s currently a thirty-five year old virgin, and doesn’t have many friends. He was smart in high school, but found college tough, and now works at a camera shop. (Here he is on life at university:
I mean, did I have a hard time re-conceptualizing myself as a not-genius? Yeah, that took some processing.
This sort of confidence is why men are men and women are not men).
He talks about how he used to shoplift as a young man, just to see what he could get away with, and what I concluded in the end is that this was probably what was going on with the assault.
I felt rather sorry for the author herself by the end. She has had what seems a remarkably large number of non-consensual sexual experiences (her first boyfriend, four years her senior, forced her into oral sex; she was date raped; she was fondled by a high school teacher); and seems to have a lot of issues around men in general (she is glad her father is dead at the time of this rape because she doesn’t want to make him unhappy by telling him about it (?!?)). I can’t think of a single significant non-consensual sexual experience I’ve had (I mean other than groping or whatever, but that’s just being alive and female). Also if something did happen to me I would tell my dad about it ASAP because he would sort it out immediately.
Also depressingly, it seems to me clear she lives in ‘cancel culture’ because she spends much of the book worrying that people will critique her for giving her rapist so much of a voice in her book. I mean jesus lady, it’s your rape. You do what you want with it.