Working With Available Light Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery

The Hungry Mind is a refuge for those of us who like to pretend that our books and our commerce share no association. It's as affable as a great hardware store or deli. I relax immediately when I walk through the door, hoping to have a moment to browse. But instead I meet a pair of eyes staring at me from behind the reading glasses I am still unaccustomed to seeing on my former husband's face. We offer one another a tight-lipped smile, the only greeting we can manage these days, five years after our divorce, 25 years after our marriage. And then we both shake our heads: Of course you'd be here.

Our own efforts to communicate across the chasm rape creates have ended, but I know why he's here. Eighteen years later, he's still trying to understand what happened to us and hoping to be understood. It touches me to see him, and saddens me in a place I've forgotten I still hurt.

This is a book my former husband longed for, sometimes in anger, as we struggled through the layers of damage and repair following my survival of a violent rape in 1981. We'd been well and happily married for seven years before the man with the knife broke into our apartment while Tim was away and I was asleep. The effort to survive the aftermath of rape got the best of us. The end of our marriage and of a family life with our son is the cruelest of the losses I attribute to that crime. The struggle to "remap" the world after rape, in Kalven's apt phrase, was one which challenged my husband as it did me. But in the self-absorption of trauma I had little ability to understand his struggle. All during Jamie Kalven's reading that night, I was aware of listening for two. How were Kalven's thoughtful, measured lines striking me and how were they striking Tim? Two weeks later, I saw Kalven again at "You Are Not Alone," an event in Los Angeles organized by the Rainbow Sisters Project to honor rape survivors and "those who have given them voice." This day of testimony and pride attracted 400 people, including the authors of four new books about the experience of rape. All published in the last six months, these books constitute what might be called a flowering of a new literature on rape. In addition to Kalven and me, there was Nancy Venable Raine, author of "After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back" and Charlotte Pierce-Baker, who wrote "Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape."

We met one another like shipwrecked sailors staggering out of caves, squinting in the light of recognition. For each of us, the choice to treat the experience of rape as a literary subject was made with the knowledge that such a thing had not been done before. Our meeting was a chance to relax with others who know what it's like to bring a book into a world which is simultaneously starving for the material and trying to ignore it.

But something else happened for me that weekend. I was invigorated by the sense of a movement, a rumbling, a change in the air. I wrote "Telling" hoping to start conversations I believe are the next step in addressing a crime whose existence we accept too easily. That weekend the conversation was erupting all around us. And one of the most telling dimensions of this expanded conversation about rape was the presence of a male voice.

Jamie Kalven's "Working With Available Light" is a pleasure to read -- a literate, thoughtful account of the re-mapping of a world that was destroyed one afternoon in 1988 when a waiting stranger dragged his wife Patsy from the running path on Chicago's lakefront, then beat and raped her while cars roared by on the highway. Kalven writes of the next five years in their family life, of Patsy's struggle to maintain her independent spirit, their daughter's ongoing nightmares and fears, his own attempt to carry on with work and relationships amid the turmoil at home.

As I read, I carry with me an image of Patsy from our meeting in Los Angeles. Tall, lovely, wry, she is a woman who leaves an impression of dignity, strength, and intelligence. This is the woman I picture even as I read of her despair, our shared sentiments all too apparent: I don't think I can do this ... I never imagined it would be like this ... I don't think I'm going to make it ... If I didn't have children, I might kill myself.

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