What A Body Remembers, Karen Stefano
What A Body Remembers, Karen Stefano
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What A Body Remembers
A Memoir of Sexual Assault and Its Aftermath

Author: Karen Stefano

Narrator: Nicole Poole

Unabridged: 7 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/11/2019


Synopsis

On a summer night in 1984, nineteen-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested.

Fast forward 2014, thirty years after her assault, when her life, once again, appears to be crumbling. As she stumbles her way through the days, navigating a dying marriage, devastating financial loss, and an elderly mother slipping into dementia at disheartening speed, she becomes fascinated by her own anxiety, by the PTSD still triggered by the sound of footsteps and she wonders, why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget? Her questions prompt an obsession with her assailant: Whatever became of him? What is he doing now? She begins a quest of excavation, determined to find out, tracking down the police report and court file from her case, and on the thirtieth anniversary of her attack returns to Berkeley and the scene of her assault. What she discovers is life altering.

About Karen Stefano

Karen Stefano is the author of the short story collection The Secret Games of Words and the how-to business writing guide Before Hitting Send. Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, California Lawyer, Psychology Today, the South Carolina Review, Tampa Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She is also a JD/MBA with more than twenty years of complex litigation experience.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Doug

How can an event fracture, cloud, and inspire a person? Karen Stefano weaves the fabric of her life from the single point of a needle in 1984 into a stifling blanket for all of us to wrap ourselves in and fling off enraged and unleashed.......more

Goodreads review by Deirdre

Karen Stefano’s memoir is a gripping read, fluid and crisp despite the passing of thirty years between many of the incidents she recalls and now. Stefano repeatedly reminds us that trauma stays long after the experience has passed—bodies remember—but sometimes we have limited control over how and wh......more

Goodreads review by Gilion

Karen Stefano is a lawyer and author. Her new memoir, What a Body Remembers: A Memoir of Sexual Assault and Its Aftermath, examines the lasting effects of trauma. Stefano was assaulted in college, went on to become a criminal defense attorney, and 30 years later was hit with anxiety and PTSD that sh......more