World Books Review: A Vivid ‘Denial’

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The aftereffects of trauma inform both the content and style of Jessica Stern’s memoir, which is often vivid, surprisingly candid and well-described but, at times, disjointed and unprocessed.

Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern. Ecco, 320 pages, $24.99.

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Denial is a difficult book, uncomfortable to read and even more uncomfortable to review. It is a first-hand, detailed account by a Harvard expert on terrorism of her rape by a stranger when she was 15 years old. Using police records and some of the same methodology she used to interview international terrorists, Jessica Stern tries to understand the man who raped her in 1973, as well as the rape’s long-term sequelae for herself. Her story is often vivid, surprisingly candid and well- described but, at times, disjointed and unprocessed. The aftereffects of trauma inform both its content and style.

Jessica Stern’s first book, The Ultimate Terrorists, was published in 1999, before the events of 9/11, and was one of the first to predict the new forms of twenty-first century terrorism. Her second book, Terror in the Name of God , examines religiously-motivated terrorists — Muslims, Jews, Christians — who wish to transform the world through extreme forms of violence. It came out in 2003 and argues for an understanding of terrorism as a form of psychological warfare.

In both books, Stern is concerned with research and policy: nowhere in their sometimes textbook-like pages is there a hint of her personal motivations for working on Denial: A Memoir of Terror.

Born in 1958, Stern grew up in unusually complicated family circumstances in Concord, Massachusetts. Her father was a German Jewish scientist who found refuge in the United States in the late 1930s; her mother was an American Jew who died of cancer when the author was three. Her father remarried twice, sending Jessica and her younger sister to live first with their maternal grandparents, then bringing them to a first and then a second step-mother.

In addition, her maternal grandfather — a physician whose license to practice was eventually revoked — may have inadvertently killed her mother by irradiation. Stern also suspects that her grandfather sexually molested her while her father “disappeared into a life of work and love affairs. Although he was living with us at our grandparents’ house, I rarely saw him and thought he had moved away.”

Whew!

Each one of these developments would provide plenty of material for a memoir, but there is more. In 1973, Jessica, age 15, and her younger sister Sara, age 14, were raped in their first step-mother’s Concord home, at gunpoint, by a stranger who (it is later confirmed) went on to rape at least 44 other girls and young women. That evening, their step-mother had taken her biological children out to dinner. Their father was in Norway with his new wife and did not return until three days later. The local police did not believe the two teenage girls when they testified that the rapist was a stranger.

When Dad returned, he instructed his daughters to “move forward” as he had done when he emigrated to America, and to put the past behind them. The two girls tried to forget their rape. No one seems to have suggested counseling or psychotherapy or pursuing justice. We don’t learn how the rape later affected Sara, but Jessica Stern provides a partial sketch of herself as a difficult adolescent.

Stern eventually graduated from Barnard College with a degree in chemistry and was drawn to doing technical work, related to terrorist weaponry. She earned a masters in Technology Policy from MIT, and a doctorate in government from the Kennedy School at Harvard where her dissertation was on chemical weapons proliferation. She worked as a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory analyzing the possibilities for theft or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons in Russia and then spent a year at the National Security Council at the White House.

“Eventually,” she writes, “I gave in to an intense curiosity about terrorists themselves. In that work I made use of a personality quirk, rather than my academic training. I am fascinated by the secret motivations of violent men and I’m good at ferreting them out.”

The psychologically alert reader will pause at her attribution of motive to “a personality quirk.” Stern discovered that she was very good at interviewing terrorists, intrepid, curious, and even empathic. Though her growing number of professional articles about them provided a useful, secret and professionally prestigious way to master her experience of rape and rage at her rape, she did not at first make any connection between the two kinds of terror.

She does tell us early on, that “with each passing year, I seemed to feel less and less, less pain but also less joy . As a child I wanted to be a writer but continuing bad grades in classes that required writing persuaded me to give up. I found myself more comfortable studying unemotional subjects.” Then she “got seduced by curiosity about violence. I was both repulsed and fascinated.”

Stern does not delve beyond these observations at first. She takes pride in her unusual reaction to fear as she travels to places like Lahore and Beirut but is puzzled by feeling frightened in situations that other people don’t experience as frightening: in crowds at night or in shopping malls under fluorescent lights.

Again, the reader thinks: these are symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It’s unclear what the narrator thinks. When Stern briefly recounts that she consulted a therapist because she wants to be “more efficient at work,” and the therapist suggests that Jessica may be suffering from PTSD, Stern dismisses the diagnosis as irrelevant to her.

Stern is similarly laconic when she describes how she first decided to request the police records pertaining to her case. In her preface, she writes, “After the completion of my second book on terrorism, I found myself wanting to understand what had happened to me during and after my rape” but not how old she was or what led her to connect her work on terrorism with a need to understand the background of her rapist. A vagueness and confusing style permeate her writing throughout this memoir.

I infer that Stern requested her police file in the fall of 2006 (when she was about 45) and that she had to wait for a police procedure to black-out the names in the 30-year-old files in order to protect the privacy of people mentioned in them. I also infer that Stern’s former schoolmate Lieutenant Paul Macone, now deputy chief of police in Concord, performed that function. In the process, he figured
out that the perpetrator might still be at large. Prompted by frustration at an elusive serial rapist at large. Lt. Macone contacted Stern and asked her help in tracking him down.

For the reader of memoir, all this is rich, fascinating and volatile material that requires great skill to structure and transform into narrative. What’s the primary story? How do the back stories feed into it? What‚ is the primary story, as Stern sees it? Stern raises many questions (some perhaps inadvertently) that go unanswered. How did the early loss of her mother factor into the aftermath of the rape? Why does she feel “alone” in her experience when her sister was also victimized by the rapist? Why does she begin her book free-associating about her grandfather? Does denial and disavowal in extend to her researching and writing her memories?

These questions would challenge a veteran memoirist, let alone a rookie.

Denial pairs compelling, valuable subject matter with uneven, undigested writing. The result is a book that often lurches from riveting to tedious. Stern’s summary of the rape and its aftermath are riveting:

“A doctor examined us….I remember bright lights shining on my body and in my eyes, like a crime scene in a dream. In the dream, someone had accidentally transferred my soul to someone else’s body for the evening. My sister Sara was in the hospital too. But she must have been down the hall because I couldn’t hear her voice. I felt alone…The laboratory reports indicate that sperm were detected in my underpants, my leotard, and my jeans.”

Then she informs the reader that this is not the first time she has read her police file. in 1994 one of her neighbors thought she might have been sexually abused: “I asked the police for my then-twenty-year-old file, and they sent me part of it, including a barely audible audiotape. Even now, I haven’t found the courage to listen to it…”

This is extremely painful material and the reader feels for the narrator’s emotional struggle. But we also feel that a good memoirist has to identify its components and incorporate them into writing.

There are times when Stern is able to do this. Her description of the reactions and memories her police file evokes in her middle-aged mind and body are specific and powerful:

“The police asked my sister and me to write down what had occurred. We did this, the report states, between 11:30 P.M. and 1:45 A.M. Those words are before me now. I read the words I wrote, in a penmanship I barely recognize. My notes from 1973 are written in italics below.

–sitting doing homework/

–man walked in/

“The penmanship looks alien. I don’t recognize the person captured in these words, the writing slanting backward, the letters round, fat. Was I ever this feminine? I try to imagine man walked in.”

Stern gives the reader a good sense of her fury when she later reads a psychiatric evaluation of her rapist as part of his prison records: “It occurs to me that I would like to take a baseball bat to this man, this so-called psychiatrist… Can a trained psychiatrist really assume that a rapist with a gun in his hand could have ‘sex relations’ with a girl under the threat of harm and still ‘hurt her in no way?’ She
writes this after finding her (dead by suicide) rapist’s prison records: “As I write these words I imagine this doctor’s penis wilting and shrinking in terror, as small as a bean, and there is some satisfaction in this cruel thought. But wilting is not enough: I want to bloody him. In my mind’s eye I swing a bat right at this doctor’s learned head, smashing his bad, addled brain, a brain capable of judging a convicted rapist as a not sexually dangerous person… “

Stern’s focus dissipates, however, when she sets out on a search to understand her rapist through what seem to be a series of haphazard interviews with people who knew him. Many are tedious because Stern simply does not write well enough to delineate core from peripheral observations. She needed a dedicated editor and more time to rethink and rewrite.

The reader needs the kind of context for these interviews that she provides in her book about international terrorists: i.e. what were her interviewees told about her project? Did she lie about her objectives or state them clearly? Did she do multiple interviews or are we reading a one-shot? Did she use a tape recorder or are we reading her reconstructed notes? A closer examination of the ambivalence and secrecy that permeate her quest might have dramatized these chapters, which instead come off as pallid and rambling.

And pursing the subject of context and reading, there’s hardly any reference to prior work on her many themes. Did she read (and take in) Susan Brownmiller’s classic book on rape or the many others that followed its publication? Did she study Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery or any of the many studies that explain her own behavior? Any of the large literature on Holocaust survivors and their families that would contextualize her father? If so, what helped her understand herself? If she did not read up on any of these subjects, why not?

This inexplicable omission of the vast literature on shame, rape, motherless daughters, Holocaust survivors, and trauma in general is all the more peculiar because Stern introduces herself as a scholar. Is she uninterested in what other people have discovered about trauma? Does she still disavow its relevance to herself? Or is she just sloppy? In a memoir, the reader wants to know.

When Stern finally queries other rape survivors and the occasional expert, she sometimes misconstrues their points. She sometimes seems to be an unreliable narrator, more at the mercy of her story than in control of it. For example, in her quest to understand her German Jewish father, Stern quotes a prominent psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor. I was surprised by the ideas Stern attributed to this analyst and, since the analyst is a friend of mine, I checked her quote. Stern had not only misunderstood her, but had not told her that she was being interviewed or that her opinions would be quoted. In fact, they had had a short conversation in a corridor after a lecture.

Stern’s inferences in her interviews are also casual. She often interprets for the reader rather than letting us make up our own minds about dialogue she transcribes. Her references are careless. In a rare foray into Holocaust literature (she seems to have read a bit of Primo Levi and Bruno Bettelheim) she misunderstands the term and reasons for the evolution of the “musulman” in the concentration camps. And although she alludes to undergoing psychotherapy before writing this memoir, she tells us nothing about what kind it was, how it helped her, or what role it played in her decision to write this book.

Stern, like so many contemporary writers with an interesting idea for a book, may have been ill-served by her advisors and rushed to print before she had enough time to integrate her very difficult material. These days, memoirs are regarded less as literary creations than as “projects” with more attention paid to marketing potential than to the transformation of memories into writing. Copy-editors and fact-checkers are figures of the past; editors are too busy acquiring to read carefully and edit. One of the results is that the reader is left to connect the dots that elude the author.

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Helen Epstein writes and reviews memoirs. You can link to her work on Kindle