What A Body Remembers

By Karen Stefano,

Book cover of What A Body Remembers: A Memoir of Sexual Assault and Its Aftermath

Book description

On a summer night in 1984, nineteen-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul-chilling struggle, she manages to escape.

Though she is left traumatized by…

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Why read it?

1 author picked What A Body Remembers as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I don’t know how Karen Stefano did it...this brave memoir, thirty years in the making, is a perfect case study of PTSD and how trauma from sexual assault can rear its ugly head at any time—even after years in hibernation.

The daily struggle Stefano faced was real. She worked as a criminal defense lawyer fighting for those accused of heinous crimes—some as bad as the ones that were committed against her decades earlier while she was a uniformed patrol officer on a college campus.

I was touched by her honesty, moved by her courage, and blown away by her humanity.…

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