On My Radar:

I Will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her
by Joanna Connors
Atlantic Monthly Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:


“This is it. My rape. I knew it was coming. Every woman knows. And now here it is. My turn.”
When Joanna Connors was thirty years old on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to review a play at a college theater, she was held at knifepoint and raped by a stranger who had grown up five miles away from her. Once her assailant was caught and sentenced, Joanna never spoke of the trauma again, until twenty-one years later when her daughter was about to go to college. She resolved then to tell her children about her own rape so that they could learn and protect themselves, and she began to realize that the man who assaulted her was one of the most formative people in her life.

Setting out to uncover the story of her attacker, Connors embarked on a journey to find out who he was, where he came from, who his friends were, and what his life was like. What she discovers stretches beyond one violent man’s story and back into her own, interweaving a narrative about strength and survival with one about rape culture and violence in America.

I Will Find You is a brave, timely consideration of race, class, education, and the families that shape who we become, by a reporter and a survivor.

“Is it possible to call the story of a violent rape and its haunting aftermath a thing of beauty? In the hands of Joanna Connors, this lucid, powerful memoir becomes its own form of redemption, as a seasoned reporter turns her gaze on her own life and that of her rapist's. I found this to be a profoundly moving, important, and, yes, beautiful book.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Still Writing