My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation

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Freya Bennett for Ramona Magazine, 9 September 2021: My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Interview with Lucia Osborne-Crowley I feel like I’m phoning it in here but rather than waffle on when I really don’t know what to say, I’m going to share some of the quotes I highlighted. As far as who else is interviewed in the book, there is a chapter on 'girl-adjacent' non-binary people, which ended up feeling token in the scheme of the whole book. The rest consisted 95% heteronormative and cisgendered women. Apart from an extremely short lesbian testimony (which was a lesbian-lesbian power dynamic), there was no mention of how male violence can impact lesbians, trans (m-f or f-m) or gay men. Osborne-Crowley's language and awareness of these other folks' vulnerability to sexual violence seemed to be completely blinkered. Working poor and disadvantaged people were also not included in the book. Jessica Payn for The Arts Desk, 28 September 2021: 10 Questions for writer Lucia Osborne-Crowley: The author of ‘My Body Keeps Your Secrets’ on trauma, shame and community

Law and Crime Podcast, 11 January 2022: ‘Obviously, This Is a Big Deal’: Reporter Who Broke Ghislaine Maxwell Juror Story Opens Up About the Complicated Fallout Women in pain wait an average of sixteen minutes longer than men to be seen by a doctor, according to the New York Times piece ‘When Doctors Downplay Women’s Health Concerns’. When women go to a doctor with a painful condition, the pain is much more likely to be dismissed as psychosomatic or just a part of ordinary life. But during this period of time, sitting on a small sofa in my north London flat, I have never felt more alone. I called the Samaritans, which means – I suppose – that I wanted to be saved. I didn’t tell anyone else how serious my feelings of hopelessness and isolation were: I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear the frustration of trite responses and platitudes, no matter how well intended. The Samaritans got me through that night. When I wrote the note, I was in the middle of a period of (literal) isolation having tested positive for Covid. I slept most of the time, ate pizza, watched a trashy film, then slept again. But once I started feeling a little better, my mind entered its own struggle.

Brave, unflinching and infuriating, the stories Lucia has collated are ones that desperately need to be heard' Osman Faruqi, award-winning journalist This book was a birthday present from my best friend last year and its been shelved for ages, one of those TBR's that never gets touched but instead becomes part of the furniture. Not so for too many women. Not only are women much more likely to develop chronic pain conditions resulting from acute pain, but many of the hitherto untreatable chronic illnesses we contend with either primarily or exclusively affect women. For women, pain is not valiant and fleeting. A beautiful, unflinching book that dives into shame what it does to us, how it affects us all and more. 🌻 this is a book that people really need to read. 📖 I want to move on from the men we call monsters because I am tired of talking about them. I want to talk about us.

I think if you use straight dialogue, more of a Q&A, you are sacrificing some of the tools that you can use to really hold people in the story. I wanted these people to feel like characters as much as interview subjects. I think it’s really hard to do well, but I wanted at least to try. And because the fly cannot see the structure imprisoning it, it is useless to say: You are in a bottle! The fly trusts that its perception of the world is real; to it there is no bottle. My Body Keeps Your Secrets, Lucia’s first full length book published in September 2021, examines the secrets a body keeps, fromgender identity,pubertyandmenstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation. My Body Keeps Your Secrets was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize in 2022. Her first book, I Choose Elena, was published in 2019 and has since been published in four territories and three languages. Her second book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, will be published in September 2021.

The Sydney Morning Herald

But the luxury of feeling things requires support. It requires mental health services to be properly funded, so people in my situation have a proper place to go: I shouldn’t have had to rely on a charity to get me through the night when my life was essentially in danger. Melanie Kembrey for The Sydney Morn ing Herald , 31 December 2020: The most anticipated books of 2021

Medical professionals and scientists have recently made a series of breakthroughs in the study of what is now known as chronic pain. Doctors define chronic pain as pain that has afflicted the sufferer for more than three months. Through the voices of women, trans and non-binary people around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, Lucia speaks of vulnerability and acceptance and the reclaiming of ourselves in a world that repeatedly asks us to carry the weight of the shame of the atrocities committed against us. This morning, I went for a walk on my own in the sun. I grew up in Australia, and I desperately need vitamin D to stay happy. It is a spring day in London, 23 March 2020. There is not a cloud in the sky, and there are daffodils everywhere.Emily Bootle for New Statesman, 1 September 2021: Reviewed in short: New books from Carole Hooven, Kristian Shaw, Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Jay Parini Van der Kolk’s investigation, in part, prompted Osborne-Crowley’s own path of radical truth-seeking and telling. She relays stories about bodies, sex, self-harm, suffering, and survival in the aftermath of abuse — all extraordinary in their frankness but ordinary in how relatable they are. I have a lot of anger after finishing it. I have a lot of sadness, frustration, incredulity. I am so pissed off at the way so many women and non binary people are treated in the most everyday, current, real situations and are expected to put up with it. I am in disbelief that this is the reality of the gendered politics of today. You broach the topic of the ethical position of the journalist: the question of how much scope there is to intervene, or reveal your proximity to your subject. “Am I just here to observe,” you ask, “to render this problem into something concrete without intervening in this moment. Is that all journalism can do? Is it enough?” Do you have answers to these questions, or is it important that they remain open?

Even though we all experience shame in the same way, there are people whom society shames more than others. One of the shame researchers I rely on a lot says that shame comes, in part, from being cast out from society: it’s about rejection or alienation. I think that’s why shame is so structural: it’s the group saying, “Here’s what we want you to be, and you have failed.” So society says: “We want gender to be binary and if you don’t fall into those categories, then we will shame you for it.” It’s the same with society telling you what your body is supposed to look like and how thin you’re supposed to be.This book brilliantly interrogates our relationship to our bodies but also to those around us, inhabiting each daily, hourly, minute-by-minute contradiction that having a body, and so being alive, entails. A testament to the power of externalising our own stories so as to understand them through others’ eyes, demonstrating how inextricably connected each of us ultimately is. Her writing is beautiful, unflinching and clear and, most importantly, it renders shame visible – a material thing that, having been sewn into the body, can also be cast off.’ The Owl on the Bookshelf, 2 September 2021: Review of My Body Keeps Your Secrets by Lucia Osborne-Crowley I have seen the expression on men’s faces so many times. That feeling like they know, on some level, that they have mistreated you. That they shouldn’t have ghosted you. They know they should feel bad about this, but they don’t. It’s like they knew they were supposed to feel guilty, but they also didn’t care”.