Though the mantra in the #metoo era is to believe victims, the writers of these books nearly all start out with a qualification or an apology. Yet what I’m arguing here is that the memoir classification for accounts of rape shrinks their cultural importance: everyone knows that true crime is a booming and serious genre, while memoir already had its heyday around 20 years ago and is now a catchall for personal stories regardless of their larger context. This might seem like a marketing quibble: publishers put books into genres in order to help the books find their audience. It’s notable that these books are classified as memoir, rather than true crime, as if women (and in the Gay anthology, men too) describing the ways they have been violated and abused are not crimes but events that unfortunately transpired and can be filed under the nebulous and all-encompassing heading of personal experience. Johnson (2014), My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta (2014), and the just released anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay. These stories are usually classified as memoir-some of the books I’m referring to include Lucky by Alice Sebold (1999), Jane Doe January by Emily Winslow (2016), The Other Side by Lacy M. In this essay I want to probe even harder issues, because I want to ask the same questions about true stories of rape.
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