Hi Katie,

First, I admire the way you blend the story within the book into your own life and pursuit of Justice, I'm currently reading Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road, which on its surface and underneath, too, is about the Galvin family and the 12 children they produced, six of whom suffered from some form of schizophrenia. The book tells that story along with the plodding nature of how modern psychiatry dealt with this mental illness--or how it tried to drug it to submission.

Buried within this story, though, is that of familial rape--how one of the diturbed brothers raped one sister and violated another for years, under the roof of the parents, and the brother's spouse. The daughter who finally told wasn't believed at first, and then she finally confronted her mother who, as she usually did, made this daughter's story her own. Only this time, the mother's story was one of her own rape by her stepfather. Horrible, but still, her daughter felt unheard.

I don't know exactly what I'm saying, but your essay triggered for me yet again, the deeply hidden story of not only the violation a woman goes through during rape, but the repeated violations at the hands of a society that would rather not see, and certainly not feel the ongoing levels of pain of the victim.

Thank you, and I look forward to reading more of your work.

Terry