Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Emily Doe.  Chanel Miller.  Brock Turner.  My guess is that you may only recognize one of these names. The name that belongs to the Stanford swimmer with the Olympic swim trial times who was accused of sexual assault in 2015. You may not even know that he was found guilty. And furthermore, you probably don’t know that the judge only sentenced him to six months in jail. Emily Doe is the woman attacked by Brock Turner on Stanford’s campus. This name was assigned to protect her identity. In Know My Name, Chanel Miller sheds the protective identity to share her story of the assault, who she was before, how she’s struggled since. But it’s through her writing, her beautiful words and descriptive prose, that the reader gets to know Chanel and begins to glimpse the immense creative talent she possesses.

I listened to this as an audio book, and I highly recommend this option specifically for this book. There is something so moving and compelling about hearing Chanel’s story from her voice. Her voice describing the pine needles in her hair and the bruising on her body, her voice assuring her sister and calming her down. Her voice telling her parents about the attack but not wanting them to worry. It’s her voice, gentle and soft spoken in the before. It’s her voice, angry, fearful, loud in the after. It’s through this recollection, this retelling of her story that she becomes everyone’s friend, sister, daughter, granddaughter, girlfriend and cousin.

It's clear early in the memoir that Chanel is a born writer. Her descriptions of clothes, people, places are so precise and beautifully written. I wasn’t surprised when she referred to and quoted Anne Lamott even closing the memoir with Lamott’s famous lighthouse quote: “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save, they just stand there shining.”  But its Chanel’s impact statement read to the court at Brock Turner’s sentencing that has become like that lighthouse Anne Lamott spoke of. The 7000-word document was shared, tweeted, and circulated all over the world and it’s Chanel’s words “to girls everywhere, I am with you “ that has become a beacon to women everywhere. The world now knows Chanel Miller’s name, and after reading this memoir I’m certain readers will search for her writing.   

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