I’m honored to host award-winning author and all around cool chick, Julia Park Tracey, today. What I love about social media is the amazing people I’ve met, including Julia. Her talent and story will touch you.
How My Sexual Assault Became Part of My Nove
By Julia Park Tracey
They say to write what you know. So I did.
When I wrote my novel, Tongues of Angels, part of which features a young woman seeking the solace of religion to soothe her anguish, I wasn’t just pulling these details out of thin air. I told Jessica’s story by telling my own. In Tongues of Angels, Jessica was going to college in San Francisco (so was I) when she invited a fellow student to her apartment to study (so did I). Her casual study session turned into a brutal sexual assault from behind, so that she couldn’t see him, but was left terrified of anyone coming from beyond her peripheral vision.
That was my experience, too.
I was sure he just wanted to talk about his kenisiology project, as I was dishing about my journalism classes. Somehow, as I moved around the apartment getting soft drinks and snacks, he seemed always to be standing right behind me, until suddenly he had me pinned on the bed and was beating me, gratifying himself over me. Afterward, as I lay there sobbing and trying to pull my clothing on, to cover myself, he assured me I had misunderstood, that I should have expected it, that it was clearly my own stupidity that had caused this drama. His blue eyes stood out against his tan, and to this day, when I see that particular combination in a man’s face, I feel sick to my stomach.
Like Jessica in the novel, I didn’t call the police. I tried to wash away the stain by pretending it hadn’t happened. I moved from my apartment into a house with friends. I didn’t go out at night if I could help it. I made choices afterward that affected my whole life. One of those choices, within the year, was to start going to a nearby Catholic Church. I wasn’t Catholic. But as Jessica says in Tongues of Angels, “Surely a church with a bloody Jesus on a cross could understand her anguish. Surely there was a place for her there.”
Jessica startles when approached from behind. She cocoons herself in her apartment with hand-stitched quilts and crocheted afghans, away from the social life of a twenty-something. She battens herself in with domestic chores and a slavish devotion to church to keep the memories away. I did the same. So when I describe Jessica as nervous as a rabbit, or jumping into fight-or-flight, I am describing my own experience with post-traumatic stress disorder, a state of almost crippling anxiety that I lived with for two decades. I held that fear and anger inside until just a few years ago, when deep therapy helped quell the demons.
Aside from writing Jessica into this contemporary tale of Catholic angst and ambiguity, I have never written about that night.
Tongues of Angels isn’t just about Jessica and her PTSD. The story revolves around a young Catholic priest who falls in love with Jessica and has to decide if he will stay a priest or leave to marry her. It’s a love story – and a story of faith, hope and recovery, but it’s wrapped in politics, dogma and a sassy choir of gossiping priests who lay roadblocks in their way. Most of those stories are also grounded in reality, founded on the tales I heard from my priest friends after joining the Catholic Church, and then marrying one of the priests who – like Rob Souza – left the priesthood to marry me. All of these details are true in the one way that Earnest Hemingway recommended that we write – they are emotionally true, and that’s why they feel so authentic.
Maybe the advice to “write what you know” is trite, or hackneyed. Maybe it leaves less room for imagination than you’d like. But there’s one thing writing what you know definitely brings: release. So, as an author and a writing mentor, I do advise my students to write what they know. Sharing an authentic story, being vulnerable on the page, opening that metaphoric vein, can be the best writing you ever did.
Julia Park Tracey is the author of Tongues of Angels: A Novel, available on Amazon from Indie-Visible Ink. Follow Julia on GoodReads, Twitter @juliaparktracey and on Facebook/juliaparktraceyauthor. You can also find her at www.juliaparktracey.com.
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