Notes on a Silencing

“It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me.”

Lacy Crawford’s latest autobiographical book, Notes on a Silencing, focuses on her school days and a horrific sexual assault she experienced there. Crawford went to a boarding school, St. Paul’s, during the 1990s, and her assault went unnoticed—or rather, ignored—by her school. The novel was her method of bringing to light the school’s history of ignoring their students.

Crawford’s writing style is simple—yet, she treats her reader like a friend she’s telling her story to. She lays out the facts, the environment of the school, and the people who worked and learned there. You learn of the kind girl named Elise who would read Simone de Beauvoir in the original French, the welcoming female priest who allowed

Crawford to go on runs with her enormous dog for safety, the strange but enthusiastic English teacher whom she adored (but later found out he was a pedophile), and the nurses, who didn’t know the exact ailment that Crawford was suffering from, but tried for months to uncover it.

The actual details of the assault are on the back of Crawford’s mind—rather, she wants to analyze the environment that would allow for something so horrible to go by without any action. The reader almost feels like a detective, of sorts, who follows the path Crawford lays out carefully and analyzes her high school experience with her.

If the reader hopes for a happy ending, however, it comes far too late. She flies from her high school days to 2018, when her assault case jumps back up on police radar as the school gets tried for multiple similar cases.

Crawford makes a point to show that the school isn’t unique in its habits of silencing their women. She notes that this was the culture of the 1990s, and that people kept things hidden that shouldn’t have been hidden. It’s a strong reminder that the world hasn’t changed all that much since Lacy Crawford was a student, and that similar cases, like the ones she brings up with the 2018 trial against the school, are still happening today, and that the school, and society as a whole, are still trying to “silence” their victims. Notes on a Silencing is a must-read, especially in the era of #MeToo.