My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation

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My Body Keeps Your Secrets is engrossing, fierce and shows the writer’s intellect and talent, but as the journalistic follow-up to a straight memoir is less rigorous than expected. But there is no doubting that Osborne-Crowley is playing an important role in raising the profile of marginalised experiences of gender inequality, and for that fact alone, this book is worthy of a read. In narrative terms, one of the aspects of the book I found really interesting was the way you captured the stories of those you interviewed: you use free indirect style, rather than dialogue. How and why did you decide to write the book in this way? How did the book become “a non-fiction novel” in your own words? I feel like I’m phoning it in here but rather than waffle on when I really don’t know what to say, I’m going to share some of the quotes I highlighted. I want to move on from the men we call monsters and start talking about the greyer space. The smaller acts of shame transmission. The ones we cannot pinpoint because they do not have a beginning or an end: a jury's verdict, a healed bruise. They are just moments. They come and they go, and we think they don't hurt us, but they do. Freya Bennett for Ramona Magazine, 9 September 2021: My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Interview with Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Instead of trying to articulate how much I enjoyed this book, I am simply going to share some of my favorite quotes:Brave, unflinching and infuriating, the stories Lucia has collated are ones that desperately need to be heard' Osman Faruqi, award-winning journalist Women in pain wait an average of sixteen minutes longer than men to be seen by a doctor, according to the New York Times piece ‘When Doctors Downplay Women’s Health Concerns’. When women go to a doctor with a painful condition, the pain is much more likely to be dismissed as psychosomatic or just a part of ordinary life.

There is also a problem of focus. The book is weighted heavily towards the social and political drivers of trauma and inequality – and there’s no doubting Osborne-Crowley’s observations about the ways institutions have enabled the sexual grooming of children, or the structural gender inequality at the heart of the medical system. But in building evidence towards her presumed central thesis – that experiences of trauma have a physical, tangible impact on the bodies of survivors – she at times fails to show the whole story. Lucia Osborne-Crowley for The Independent, 5 January 2022: Ghislaine Maxwell juror breaks silence to The Independent: ‘This verdict is for all the victims’Content Warning: This article will discuss (although not in detail) trauma, sexual assault, and rape culture. If you struggle with any of the issues raised in this article, please visit mind.org.uk for support. Lucia Osborne-Crowley for Stylist, 2 September 2021: Author of My Body Keeps Your Secrets, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, on the lessons she learned after a devastating breakup The Owl on the Bookshelf, 2 September 2021: Review of My Body Keeps Your Secrets by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Pain that does not end is not a high-energy battle or a fight to the death. It is the most boring, mundane experience on Earth. It is simultaneously traumatic and dull. Something that should be extraordinary but, because of our lot, has become so very ordinary for women.In language, survivors sometimes avoid the words ‘rape’ or ‘assault’, replacing them with phrases such as ‘the incident’ or ‘that difficult time’ and this can be because of a myriad of reasons including feeling ashamed or wanting to protect those around them from hearing the brutal details of reality. In any case, changing the language we use following trauma is a way that survivors adapt and is a completely legitimate response. Through the voices of women, trans and non-binary people around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, Lucia speaks of vulnerability and acceptance and the reclaiming of ourselves in a world that repeatedly asks us to carry the weight of the shame of the atrocities committed against us. In their books My Body Keeps Your Secrets and The Way We Survive, Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Catriona Morton explore the idea of the ‘false self’ created through trauma. Lucy Hall for the Guardian, 28 September 2021: I survived rape, but I didn’t understand what trauma would do to me In her book, Osborne-Crowley writes that what made her suffer the most was not her experience of rape itself but the fact she felt compelled to hide what had happened to her because she felt she was at fault. In her research on the aftermath of trauma, Osborne-Crowley found that although everyone’s story is different, the impact on their individual lives afterwards remains mostly the same.

At the heart of this book is a strong message: It is through the stories of others that we can finally understand our own and render visible the structures of our own oppression. ' -- Emily Clements * Kill Your Darlings * This book was a birthday present from my best friend last year and its been shelved for ages, one of those TBR's that never gets touched but instead becomes part of the furniture. It’s another thing that straight journalism is quite bad at. People don’t ask these questions in journalism because, traditionally, journalists like to be authoritative: I’m reporting this story, so I know what I’m doing. I think it’s interesting to be able to say that I don’t necessarily know the answers. Ultimately, I think, the best thing to do as a journalist is to be honest – about your own vulnerabilities and your own fears. More and more often, I tell the people that I’m interviewing exactly what I’m worried about and what I know and don’t know. No one is neutral and it’s a problem to pretend that you are. My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Interview with Lucia Osborne-Crowley -- Freya Bennett * Ramona Magazine * I find trauma a really useful concept for covering all of the grey areas. The more I learn about it, the more I learn that it covers so many different experiences. I think it’s a great umbrella term for understanding the greyer spaces and understanding how they affect us, while we’re working towards having better language for those greyer spaces.

A widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies from shame from a key intersectional feminist thinker of a new generation. As this pandemic rages while I write, I am thinking a lot about the language we use to talk about illness and pain. It is always a language of combat, of war. It is militaristic and individualistic and heavy with moral weight: those who survive pain and illness are ‘fighters’, endowed with some mystic property that entitles them to ongoing life. This language is not only masculine in its own right—in its violence—but also in the sense that it only imagines a definition of pain and illness that is acute and inherently temporary. The ‘battle’ is won, or it is lost. Either way, it ends. At some point, the fight is over. A tender, intimate and generous meditation on the burdens of structural and personal shame on bodies and lives; and a radical call for the transformational power of speaking and listening.’