About this item
She Said meets Lucky in Michelle Bowdler's provocative debut, telling the story of her rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society's most serious crimes goes largely univestigated.The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone.Award-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler's memoir indicts how sexual violence has been addressed for decades in our society, asking whether rape is a crime given that it is the least reported major felony, least successfully prosecuted, and fewer than 3% of rapists ever spend a day in jail. Cases are closed before they are investigated and DNA evidence sits for years untested and disregardedRape in this country is not treated as a crime of brutal violence but as a parlor game of he said / she said.
About the Author
Michelle Bowdler is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award for non-fiction and has been a fellow at both MacDowell Colony and Ragdale. She has been published in the New York Times and in the anthologies The Anatomy of Silence (Red Press) and We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women's Political Action (McFarland) . Two of her essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Bowdler has worked in the public health field for years on issues of addiction, violence prevention, sexual health, and HIV education and has been involved for over a decade working on social justice issues related to rape and crimes of violence. She works as the Executive Director of Health & Wellness for Tufts University. Bowdler is a graduate of Brandeis University, where she studied and fell in love with literature and writing, and of the Harvard School of Public Health, where she learned that so much of healthcare access and outcomes have a social and cultural component.
