Talk to Know My Name: A Memoir like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Know My Name is Chanel Miller's memoir of being sexually assaulted behind a dumpster at Stanford University in 2015, being identified publicly as only "Emily Doe" throughout the subsequent trial, and the experience of navigating a legal process while the perpetrator — Stanford swimmer Brock Turner — became the more visible subject of the story. When Turner's father wrote a letter to the judge describing the rape as "twenty minutes of action," Miller became the author of a victim impact statement that went viral worldwide after the sentencing.
The memoir reclaims Miller's identity and full story on her own terms. She was a twenty-two-year-old Chinese-American artist living with her parents and working a dead-end job when the assault happened. The book traces her life before — a childhood split between cultures, an early artistic sensibility, a family structure defined by warmth — and then the years after, when she existed in two simultaneous realities: the anonymous "Emily Doe" who appeared in news stories, and Chanel Miller, who went to work every day, went to therapy, and tried to stay whole while a trial consumed her.
What it gets right
- 1.
Miller's decision to write under her own name was itself an act of reclamation: she had been defined by a crime committed against her for four years before the public knew who she was.
- 2.
The victim impact statement she read at Turner's sentencing became one of the most widely circulated documents about sexual assault in modern memory, read by millions in a single day.
- 3.
The legal process, even when it produces a conviction, can feel like a second violation — requiring victims to prove credibility, to submit to cross-examination about their histories, and to become a supporting character in someone else's story.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Chanel Miller is an American writer and visual artist. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in a Chinese-American family and studied literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her victim impact statement, read at the sentencing of Brock Turner in 2016 and published by BuzzFeed News with her permission, was read by eleven million people within four days. Know My Name, published in 2019, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the American Library Association's Alex Award. She continues to make visual art.
