The Paradox at the Heart of <em>Know My Name</em>
In June 2016, something remarkable happened: A piece of documentary evidence in a court proceeding went viral. The woman who was then known only as Emily Doe read a victim-impact statement at the sentencing hearing of Brock Turner, the man who had been convicted of sexually assaulting her after a party at Stanford—while she was unconscious, on the ground, next to a dumpster. Her words were searing. “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me,” the anonymous survivor said to Turner, “and that’s why we’re here today.” And then she recounted, in precise and wincing and unrelenting detail, what it felt like to be transformed, in the space of a few moments, from “person” to “victim.” When BuzzFeed published the statement, more than 18 million people read it—a reach that would anticipate the expansion of the #MeToo movement, and that would set the stage for an assumption that guides the current moment: Authorship can be its own small form of justice.
Three years later, the woman who crafted that viral testimony has released another kind of victim-impact statement. She has revealed her true name: Chanel Miller. And she has written a memoir that converts the ongoing experience of sexual assault into literature. The book’s title, aptly, is rendered in the imperative: Know My Name.
The story Miller tells in the book begins and ends with her fight for identity. “I was found as a’s first chapter. “No wallet, no ID. Policemen were summoned, a Stanford dean was awakened to come see if he could recognize me, witnesses asked around; nobody knew who I belonged to, where I’d come from, who I was.” The book finds Miller first trying to figure out what happened to her after she attended a fraternity party with her sister, who was visiting for the weekend, and a few friends (one of them attended Stanford; Miller, living in Palo Alto at the time, decided to tag along with the group, just for fun). And then the book finds Miller attempting to reclaim herself as she negotiates her new life as a survivor. She agrees, without fully understanding what the decision will end up demanding of her, to press charges against Turner. She navigates a justice system that routinely demeans her while insisting that it is acting in her interest.
