Jessica Stern is one of the world’s foremost experts in terrorism—the 9/11 kind of terrorism.
As an unarmed woman, she went into some of the world’s scariest countries, met some of the world’s scariest people, and lived to tell the tale. She’s taught at Harvard and the CIA University. The FBI and National Security Council have sought her expertise on any number of terror groups and terrorist attacks. But in this book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, she tells the tale of a different kind of terrorism. As a 15 year old, she and her sister, 14, were raped. While her family and the police believed the girls’ story, very little was done to solve the crime. Certain aspects of the attack were unusual, and the police thought the girls were holding back important information. The girls received no counseling, and after a hospital visit and a few police interviews, the rape was just… sort of… dropped. Stern remarks that had it not been for her sister, she probably would have forgotten it had happened at all.
This strategy of coping is a common symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Jessica Stern spends the book relating how she rediscovered this crime committed against her innocence and how a dedicated cop, 30 years later, managed to solve the case.
It is riveting.
With the help of her research assistant, she manages to track down some of her rapist’s old friends, old girlfriends, and a neighbor. The interviews she conducts with them are shocking—not because of the revelation of any vulgar secrets but because everyone agrees that the rapist was nice—except when he wasn’t. She discovers he came from a troubled background, and while she does not excuse him for his 40+ rapes, she does start to see the man, as opposed to the rapist, and how she processes all this information is simply fascinating. We’re offered an almost excruciating window into her mind; we hear what she is thinking and we get to read about the peculiar mechanisms her body developed as protection against terror—mechanisms which, she admits, have allowed her to perform so admirably in her chosen profession.
Throughout the book, she uses one phrase (and some variants of) frequently, and I was struck by it every single time. After receiving some disturbing information, she writes, “I decide I will feel about that later.” The first time I remember reading it (page 57), I had to read it a couple of times because I thought a strange kind of typo had occurred. I thought she meant something like, “I would have to decide how I felt about that later.” I thought it might just be a bit of awkward prose. But then I realized no, this was very specifically part of how she has dealt with terror her entire life, whether it be the sexual abuse of her grandfather, her rape, or the encounters with terrorists who were just as likely to kill her as meet with her. She was not deciding how she’d feel about something later. She had tricked herself into sublimating her emotions, tricked herself into thinking she would just feel them later, when it was more convenient.
In this book, Stern interviews another rape victim, an Iraq war veteran, and her father (a Jewish man who might be willing to call himself a witness of the Holocaust, rather than a survivor of). With each of these, she learns a little more about who she is, what she has experienced, and how those experiences have shaped the kind of person she is. This last bit sounds a little obvious, but for her, it was much needed insight. Her PTSD kept her from the kind of self-knowledge most of us take for granted.
This book is not a feminist manifesto that many might think it to be given the subject matter. It’s a book that deals with the contradictions inherent to human nature—how we can hurt the ones we love, how we can deny a violence done to us even as it tears us apart, how we can forgive those who didn’t protect us—and it speaks to the survivor in every one us, regardless of the kind of trauma we’ve experienced.
This is an excellent book. I quite literally could not put it down.
