In 'Unspeakable,' A Journalist Gives Silence An Investigative Treatment
As a teenager, Harriet Shawcross retreated into silence for a year. As an adult, she set out to understand why people speak, and why they don't, in a new book.
Journalist Harriet Shawcross is fascinated by silence: why we speak, and why we don't.
She's traveled the world seeking answers to those questions, meeting earthquake survivors in Nepal, a silent order of nuns in Paris, a Buddhist retreat in Scotland. She's written a book about it, called Unspeakable: The Things We Cannot Say.
But it was her own silence that inspired this book. When she was a teenager, Shawcross stopped speaking at school for nearly a year. She could answer direct questions — she
