‘The body is a canvas; it says help me when we know that the words themselves won’t work.’
Something happened. It was over in minutes. Still, years later, it replays in your mind. You push it down inside yourself. You give it no words. It tries to come out—your body aches.
Too often, our bodies carry shame to bear the brunt of someone’s violence against us. Writer and journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley understands this too well; it has shaped the formative years of her young adult life. She contends that words – more specifically, the free-flowing words of emotions – need expression and offers her own to uncover the body’s burdens.
My Body Keeps Your Secrets sets out to articulate trauma’s manifestation within the body. The book isn’t as broad as this premise sounds: Lucia sets the focus in the opening pages through recounting being raped as a teenager in a McDonald’s toilet, an event which also formed the basis of her first book, I Choose Elena.
Here, in her second book, Lucia continues to dissect and reckon with the fallout from her rape, sandwiched between interviews with other young women and non-binary people enduring the aftermath of sexual, emotional and physical abuse.
Lucia retells their stories in vivid narrative form with thoughtful commentary and peppered references to frame trauma’s pervasive imprinting on a survivor’s biology within disordered eating, coercive sex, substance abuse, chronic pain, and strained relationships.
When I pulled this book from its postage sleeve, I thought it looked familiar. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, known as the PTSD bible, sat only inches away on the lounge. While both exhibit similar names, don Matisse cut-out bodies and deal with trauma responses, they are hardly alike in content or structure.
Unlike Van Der Kolk’s psychological and technically dense research, My Body Keeps Your Secrets takes a more intimate, only vaguely-biological approach. Outside a brief mention, Lucia doesn’t draw on van der Kolk’s extensive research. The covers’ similarity feels like a daggy marketing technique to sell more of the work of the emerging writer. Google one, find the other.
But as a nod to Lucia, her empathetic tone to describe people’s mental and physical health warmly compares to van der Kolk’s harsh clinical language about his patients’ intense symptoms (sigh, he can be so cold).
Lucia Osborne-Crowley is an open book
At one point in the text, Lucia Osborne-Crowley calls herself, rightly so, an open book. She is fluid in self-disclosure and candid about her fraught interactions with alcohol, sex and eating. It’s impressive – there are not many people who could hold a magnifying glass to, and write three hundred pages about, their aching body and mind.
As she pivots between her own unsettling, revealing stories to then investigate the same struggles within others, she is relentless in attempting to grapple with the body’s weaponisation against itself. She doesn’t use distancing language for the content beyond herself – she speaks about others’ lives with love and care, all the while tracking her internal reactions to them. This results in an astoundingly meticulous mind map, with no part of her subconscious left unexamined.
At the same time, this self-writing style balances against her experience as a journalist and legal researcher. Lucia keeps a tight grip on her writing, driving each point home with enviable precision. Her voice doesn’t take to the metaphoric or convoluted prose: she lays everything front and square. She isn’t coy about distressing events; she doesn’t shy from calling stealthing rape. While not lyrical, Lucia’s accessible syntax is the book’s most addictive trait.
There’s no release from the past
The book is a platform of her own invention, as Lucia argues that the biggest gatekeeper to shame is not allowing people to speak freely about their pain. With account after account of young people succumbing to danger, My Body Keeps Your Secrets circles back to the same place – the broken person left behind. Sometimes, the book seems to be only that – tempered laying out of glum narratives without a greater anchor. There is solace in learning the personal roots of pain compared to scientific analysis, yet Lucia lingers on the sadness of scars without fluctuating, which leaves some more critical notes to the margins.
Such an approach infuses hopelessness, but not one existing in a vacuum. Reading, I wanted to close my eyes in disbelief that the world and many of its men are so cruel. At the same time, I felt numb, having long ago accepted horrific assaults against women and non-binary people as so commonplace.
On another side of this cognitive dissonance, I felt fear knowing the descriptions of the covered malicious acts could still happen to my friends, me, or anyone anywhere. My Body Keeps Your Secrets offers no release from this anxiety.
In the same week reading this book, I watched A Promising Young Woman and, in love with Carey Mulligan, her 2009 film An Education in the same evening.
A Promising Young Woman, like My Body Keeps Your Secrets, drips with sadness. The protagonist, Cassandra, agonises alone and unheard as everyone around her minimises the rape and suicide of her best friend.
In An Education, the story of Mulligan’s 16-year-old Jenny and her relationship with a man closing-in-on-40 is treated as a coming-of-age heartbreak rather than a tale of predatory grooming (although based on the life of Lyn Barber who very much recognised it as so).
In both films, the protagonists’ safety splinters while their community turns a blind eye. Their pain is irrelevant, their future uncertain. All they have is their intuition: Jenny returns to school, and Cassandra gets her ultimate revenge. But they never find release from the past.
I went to bed feeling gross.
Is the self as a starting point too insular?
Like these films, My Body Keeps Your Secrets situates itself in a world that ignores pain rather than eliminating the responsible structural oppressions. Lucia concedes to this worldview by gathering shared experiences – it’s not hard to find women and non-binary people to tell you how the world has fucked them up.
But here lies the risk: Lucia Osborne-Crowley toes inserting herself into their narratives. Sometimes, the result is strongly discerning, like when Lucia explores her endometriosis within a larger conversation with her interviewees around cultural disbelief in women’s pain.
Sometimes, ideas falter when using her anxieties as a starting point, such as implying women lack agency in their social media use. Comparing her teen experience with that of a 13-year-old today, she concludes that the cosy MSN chat rooms of a decade ago pale to today’s jealousy and self-obsession fuelled social media. On the contrary, my teenage self was tits deeps in the toxic wasteland of Tumblr. Now, I don’t know anyone spending hours editing selfies like she says we all do; personally, I upload film scans of picnics and forest walks and dance floors or admire the happy snaps posted by friends without a second thought beyond, “Hehe, cute!”
On the far end of using her psychology as a baseline, she follows an archetype of trauma-tainted relationships which reflects her own dating history. Many featured stories – the book features a handful of apparently a hundred interviews – reveal a worrying pattern of trusting abusive or emotionally incompetent male partners despite past experiences with bad men. Unmentioned in My Body Keeps Your Secrets, however, is how hurt people also form high defences; the risk of relationships remains high, and they cannot bond with even genuinely safe partners. The reality is the same – an inability to distinguish between safety and danger – but the writer tends to focus on the most familiar vein.
Admittedly, the above is a sharp criticism. Using the self to understand trauma is a generous yet loaded position for an author to take on. Writing through emotion (here, hinged on Lucia’s sensitive listening and sharing) rather than a scientific method, leaves room for confirmation bias and insularity.
I only flag it to show that when Lucia subjectively mirrors her bodily experience onto others, My Body Keeps Your Secrets becomes a Venn diagram to its searching reader. It overlaps in some places and diverts in others as Lucia’s thoughts meander between social criticism and meditative memoir as a means to immerse herself into the physical and psychological wounds of shame.
What about hope?
Overall, My Body Keeps Your Secrets mourns with women and non-binary people losing their peace through the continued, internalised violence against their bodies. It doesn’t seek to offer hope, calm, or resolution – it merely presents the lot some of us are dealt.
It’s difficult to feel equipped to decipher this gut-wrenching book; I became tired and anxious circling the devastating reality that after abuse, suffering continues for a lifetime. Recovery was a side note of many narratives because Lucia almost depicts it as a pipe dream. Without demanding unnecessary optimism, should there be a reason for a trauma deep-dive besides detailing pervasive pain?
The book wades through grief, with only twinges of hope for the author’s life in the final pages. Does Lucia want her readers to harness strength for themselves and others or crumple in despair? While bringing up crucial anecdotes, My Body Keeps Your Secrets isn’t acrobatic in buoying its bleeding heart toward something more.
I think Lucia recognises this when she talks about her attempt to get closer, and fears not being good enough, in making “slippery things expressible.” The book reveals her veracity as an intuitive thinker, grappling with her notes, creating an ethnographer’s journal, and shaping a research proposal for the fully realised thesis to come.
Words are important. But in this book, these words feel like a rainy day, looking out the window onto a drenched world, knowing your damaged self cannot leave. Do we deserve better? I hope Lucia can one day find the words that take our healing beings outside to feel the warmth of the sun.
Book review: My Body Keeps Your Secrets by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin).
Read more of Tahney Fosdike’s arts criticism here.