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The voice is clear, natural and readable, staying within the realm of personal testimony
The fact that “rape memoir” has become a literary genre in its own right is a depressing reflection of our society; more sobering still is the knowledge of how many stories remain unwritten and untold.
Within the genre, different structures and styles emerge. Some memoirs, such as Know My Name by Chanel Miller, use a personal narrative to give broader systemic and cultural critiques about the societal construction of justice and victimhood.
Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life , explores the nature of memory and reconstruction of the self after trauma, while Lucia Osbourne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena asks what medicine, trauma theory and literature reveal about the impact of trauma on the body and self. Writers such as Roxane Gay and Dorothy Allison have written more thematic and literary memoirs, where sexual violence is the originating wound but the writers then use essayistic and poetic writing to explore subjects such as embodiment, fatness, queerness, class and occupying space.
Nikita Hand ’s memoir Not The Perfect Victim, cowritten with Kathryn Rogers, acts primarily as testimony, recounting Hand’s experience of being sexually assaulted by Conor McGregor , the PTSD she suffered in the aftermath and her fight to bring McGregor to justice via a civil case when the DPP decided not to press criminal charges. As the media coverage of the case was so relentless, many details will already be known to many readers, but the description of all the ways the trauma and relentless reminders of McGregor impacted Hand’s daily life is affecting.
What also emerges is the trauma inflicted by the trial itself, and the shame she internalised from the endless attacks on her character.
“I was made out to be a liar, a loose woman, a bad mother, a habitual drinker, a drug taker and a homewrecker in the courtroom. The inference was always there below the surface: I was ‘asking for it. ’” The voice is clear, natural and readable, staying within the realm of personal testimony without explicitly veering into the realm of social critique or advocacy. This choice makes sense.
Hand was silenced and intimidated, branded a liar and forced to contend with a man whose fame, immense resources and depressingly large international fan base gave him extraordinary power over the narrative. In that context, telling her story in her own words is a reclamation of voice, credibility and narrative power - and an immense act of courage. Roe McDermott is an Irish Times columnist
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