Denial: A Memoir of Terror
"I have listened and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak."\ One of the world's foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder investigates her own unsolved adolescent sexual assault at the hands of a serial rapist, and in so doing, examines the horrors of trauma and denial.\ \ Alone in an unlocked house in a safe neighborhood in the suburban town of Concord, Massachusetts, two good, obedient girls, Jessica Stern, fifteen, and her sister, fourteen, were raped...
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"I have listened and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak." One of the world's foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder investigates her own unsolved adolescent sexual assault at the hands of a serial rapist, and in so doing, examines the horrors of trauma and denial. Alone in an unlocked house in a safe neighborhood in the suburban town of Concord, Massachusetts, two good, obedient girls, Jessica Stern, fifteen, and her sister, fourteen, were raped on the night of October 1, 1973. The girls had just come back from ballet lessons and were doing their homework when a strange man armed with a gun entered their home. Afterward, when they reported the crime, the police were skeptical. The rapist was never caught. For over thirty years, Stern denied the pain and the trauma of the assault. Following the example of her family, Stern—who lost her mother at the age of three, and whose father was a Holocaust survivor—focused on her work instead of her terror. She became a world-class expert on terrorism, a lauded academic and writer who interviewed terrorists around the globe. But while her career took off, her success hinged on her symptoms. After her ordeal she could not feel fear in normally frightening situations. Stern believed she'd disassociated from the trauma altogether, until a devoted police lieutenant reopened the sisters' rape case and brought her back to that harrowing night more than three decades past. With the help of the lieutenant, Stern began her own investigation—bringing to bear all her skills as a researcher—to uncover the truth about the town of Concord, her family, and her own mind. The result is Denial, a candid, courageous, and ultimately hopeful look at a trauma and its aftermath. The Washington Post - Marie Arana 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."
\ Publishers WeeklyIn 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)\ \ \ \ \ Booklist (starred review)“Wonderfully compassionate, absorbing reading for anyone.”\ \ \ Time magazine“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.”\ \ \ \ \ Vogue“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.”\ \ \ \ \ New York Times“DENIAL [is] a profound human document… it is hot to the touch in ways that are both memorable and disturbing.”\ \ \ \ \ Cleveland Plain Dealer“[An] eloquent, vital book. . .brilliant [and] indispensable.”\ \ \ \ \ Elle“[A] stunningly brave book.”\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsTerrorism 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.\ \ \ \ \ Marie AranaAccording 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\ \ \ \ \ Dwight Garner…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\ \
