Where I stopped : remembering rape at thirteen /

At 13, Ramsey was independent, tough, and very smart. Almost too smart. After being raped, she knew exactly what to do and conducted herself throughout the investigation and trial with considerable aplomb. But the adults in her life, especially her parents, failed to provide any emotional or spiritual comfort, thus condemning her to the dark, lonely silence of her stoicism. This book, which gleams as brightly as a searchlight against the night sky, is Ramsey's unsparing account of coming to terms with rape, a rape that savaged her innocence, warped her sexuality, and estranged her from family, friends, true-hearted lovers, and even herself. Ramsey is a poet, and her eye and ear for details and emotional nuance are extraordinary, infusing this exacting tale with a cathartic power. She traces every stage of her emotional life and chronicles her predictably disastrous relationships with men and her quest to be somehow "unraped." She did finally meet a compassionate man, but it was the writing of this magnificently honest book, 27 years after the fact, that healed the wounds of rape, and Ramsey's story, so courageously and beautifully told, will teach and heal others. --Donna Seaman

Ramsey, a poet, has written a devastatingly honest account of her rape and her attempts to heal herself. Her initial response to the rape was fear, anger, and confusion about the personal meaning of the assault and the profound isolation and loneliness afterward. Her already dysfunctional family was unable to reach out to her and provide the support‘verbal, physical, and emotional‘she needed. Consequently, the effects of the trauma remained, causing self-destructive behavior into her adult years. Written with candid self-awareness, sensitivity, and grace, this is truly a poet's book. Highly recommended for public, high school, and university collections.‘Sharon Firestone, Ross-Blakley Law Lib., Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A memoir stunning in its unflinching directness and in the precision and deftness of the rememberer's descriptive voice. Ramsey, now an award-winning poet (Blood Stories, not reviewed), was raped when she was 13 years old. She heartbreakingly evokes the day it happened--how sexy she felt riding her bike, wearing her favorite red dress, which fit just right, how she imagined someone looking at her and admiring her as she rode past, and how grown-up she had felt riding alone to visit her teacher, who lived far away. She does not shrink from the rape itself either; she describes it, and her later rememberings of it, with careful exactness and simplicity. She thoughtfully chronicles the rape's effect on her adult sexual and emotional life, including her struggle to write about it. The parts of the book that deal with her family may be the most wrenching. Both of her parents were alcoholics--a situation Ramsey describes with painful specificity, without taking refuge in the clichés of contemporary recovery jargon. She considers how her parents were unable to help her at the time, unable to comfort and protect her, and reflects on her anger and on the possibility that rape made her isolation from them inevitable. With a depth that is rare in stories of childhood sexual trauma, Ramsey explores the girl she was before the attack, what her life was like, and how that life affected her experience of rape--as well as the ways rape irrevocably changed it. Ramsey interviews others who remember her trauma, including her drunk and aging father, who has flashes of touching lucidity; these memories fascinatingly complicate Ramsey's own assumptions about the past. Rejecting the lost innocent, the victim, the heroic survivor, and other tired archetypes, Ramsey tells her story in her own way, with subtle, shattering power.