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A review by half_book_and_co
I Choose Elena by Lucia Osborne-Crowley
4.0
4,5
"By far the most dangerous element of my assault was the fact that I lived in a world where it was unspeakable. I knew, as soon, as it happened, without ever being told, that I must say nothing. Indignity is painful but silence is a prison."
At fifteen Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a successful gymnast who feels deeply connected to her body, in control of every micro movement, searing through the air. Then one night, she is raped. She doesn't tell anyone and instead tries by her own to continue with her life. But her body begins to deteriorate. It takes her ten years and diagnoses of endometriosis and Crohn's disease until she is able to start to work through the violence she has experienced.
"I Choose Elena" is the second book I read in The Mood Indigo Essay Series (the other being These Bones Will Rise Again) and it is the second quiet triumph. Osborne-Crowley chronicles her painful journey and writes about the ways the body holds trauma. It's an essay about the realities of and discourses around sexualized violence, recent trauma studies, the hassle of getting chronical illnesses diagnosed (and the ways especially women in pain are treated by medical professionals), the long-time percussions of untreated trauma, and literature (the title alluding to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels).
This book offers so much on only 150 small pages. In the last pages of the book, Osborne-Crowley emphasises how her access to help (medical etc) is not the norm and connect with privileges. I only wished for a few more sentences here and there to highlight how marginalized women are effected differently (for example when she looks into studies on how women's pain is undertreated).
"Once trauma finds you it does not let you go. And so we re-traumatize ourselves, believing we are rotten because we are the type of people to whom bad things happen, when in fact it is the living, breathing memory of the first bad thing that keeps sending us back, again and again and again, into the volcano."
"By far the most dangerous element of my assault was the fact that I lived in a world where it was unspeakable. I knew, as soon, as it happened, without ever being told, that I must say nothing. Indignity is painful but silence is a prison."
At fifteen Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a successful gymnast who feels deeply connected to her body, in control of every micro movement, searing through the air. Then one night, she is raped. She doesn't tell anyone and instead tries by her own to continue with her life. But her body begins to deteriorate. It takes her ten years and diagnoses of endometriosis and Crohn's disease until she is able to start to work through the violence she has experienced.
"I Choose Elena" is the second book I read in The Mood Indigo Essay Series (the other being These Bones Will Rise Again) and it is the second quiet triumph. Osborne-Crowley chronicles her painful journey and writes about the ways the body holds trauma. It's an essay about the realities of and discourses around sexualized violence, recent trauma studies, the hassle of getting chronical illnesses diagnosed (and the ways especially women in pain are treated by medical professionals), the long-time percussions of untreated trauma, and literature (the title alluding to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels).
This book offers so much on only 150 small pages. In the last pages of the book, Osborne-Crowley emphasises how her access to help (medical etc) is not the norm and connect with privileges. I only wished for a few more sentences here and there to highlight how marginalized women are effected differently (for example when she looks into studies on how women's pain is undertreated).
"Once trauma finds you it does not let you go. And so we re-traumatize ourselves, believing we are rotten because we are the type of people to whom bad things happen, when in fact it is the living, breathing memory of the first bad thing that keeps sending us back, again and again and again, into the volcano."