Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Know My Name
by Chanel Miller
Viking, 2019

“People sometimes say, I can’t imagine. How do I make them imagine?”

Millions of people worldwide first knew Chanel Miller as Emily Doe, the woman whose victim impact statement went viral on Buzzfeed in 2016. Miller, a recent college graduate visiting her home in Palo Alto, enjoyed a night of tacos and whiskey before going to a Stanford frat party with her younger sister and friends. The party started out with her dancing like a goof to embarrass her sister, and ended with her waking in an unfamiliar hospital room the next morning. She’d been assaulted by a Stanford freshman, Brock Turner. Or, to use syntax more befitting this memoir, Brock Turner had assaulted her.

Know My Name is her account of that night, her years fighting her case in court, and her day-to-day experience of trauma. You can predict many of the book’s descriptors before you ever read a page of it: Emotional. Raw. Unflinching. Powerful, along with its cousin, Empowering. Such is the nature of this narrative framework. What’s harder and more pressing to describe is the painstaking specificity given to these words. The revelation isn’t that Miller felt violation or loss or anger or gratitude: it’s that, by the end of the book, you know how each of these abstractions tastes and feels to this particular human.

Infamously, Miller was denied this sort of humanity for most of her trial, while Brock Turner was granted it in abundance. News reports always mentioned that he was a star swimmer with Olympic-level talent, someone bright and attractive with the whole world open to him. Former teachers and coaches and even girlfriends vouched for his character. At his sentencing, his father spoke about his favorite food. Miller’s alcohol use was interrogated to the ounce, framed as ongoing proof of poor decisions; Turner’s history of drug and alcohol use was overlooked. “I wondered if, in their eyes, the victim remained stagnant, living forever in that twenty-minute time frame,” Miller muses. “She remained frozen, while Brock grew more and more multifaceted, his stories unfolding, a spectrum of life and memories opening up around him…My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”

Another tricky quality of memoir: ordinary life can pale in comparison to life’s signature events. There’s an inherent weight, drama, and arc to a court case. Everyday worries and choices are sprawling, unruly. Miller writes in a methodical, steely, gripping way about her trial. I knew every major turn of the case beforehand, and still found myself shaking a little, heart quickening as cross-questioning was endured, verdicts given, a sentence passed. But it’s everything in the surrounding chapters—her family and boyfriend, her childhood memories and bruising internal monologue, her stalled dreams and gradual reawakening—that adds depth to the trial. After being gifted such intimate knowledge of a person, it’s unnerving to see the ways she both does and doesn’t recognize herself in that courtroom. And it becomes abundantly clear that if Chanel Miller appears alien, disoriented, and isolated in these proceedings, it’s because the justice system is built to make her appear and feel that way.

Know My Name contextualizes this public trauma with others that Miller has been able to experience more privately. During high school, four of her classmates killed themselves by jumping in front of the Caltrain. “The shock was palpable” after the first suicide, and “everyone showed up to school wearing black, but by the fourth, we were warned not to glorify, to trigger…There was a sudden disjunction between what was felt and what was seen; all appeared normal.” In an especially morbid detail, a guard was employed to keep an eye on that specific train intersection. “What did it mean that someone was hired to keep us from killing ourselves?”

More terror, more grief. Miller was attending the University of California, Santa Barbara when a shooter went on a killing rampage, videotaping himself saying, “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it.” She and her friends barricaded themselves in an Isla Vista house as their “phones kept chiming” with more warnings, more death notices.

Years later, after her rapist had been given a 6-month jail sentence (the same California sentence extended to people who dig illegal bonfire pits), Miller watched a man who bragged about assault become president. She then witnessed that president appoint a man to the Supreme Court who became “sniffling, snarky, [and] sarcastic” when questioned about his own past as an alleged assaulter. “I had sat with restraint, never raised my voice, never retaliated” when asked personal questions in the courtroom. “I wondered why a man, who was about to sit on the highest court of the land, could not maintain his demeanor, could only spit back, embittered by the unfairness of it all.”

It’s partly this sense of context that gives such eloquence to Miller’s arguments that women are held to impossible societal standards, forced to face their helplessness at the same time they’re accused of having responsibility over every situation. But another surprising source of eloquence is Miller’s writing, which often has the vivid, off-kilter feeling of poetry. Take her description of her college town:

[Isla Vista] was a town on the ocean bluffs inhabited solely by eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds, every street lined with shabby wooden houses, bikes abandoned on lawns, overcrowded balconies, orchids growing out of recycled Franzia bottles. On sunny days you’d see beautiful girls in swimsuits holding large rafts over their heads, like ants beneath a crumb, walking down the street to the water. Guys biked with surfboards tucked under one arm, their wetsuits peeled halfway off like a banana. Isla Vista was a network of couches to sleep on, friends a block away in any direction. A wild, sunny village we called home.

The surprising details, the slightly whimsical phrases, the tender undertow—all combine to form an impression of a woman with her own brand of perceptiveness who, if circumstances allowed, would choose to be strong and silly in equal measure.

All the small conversations and reflections in Know My Name combine to offer a full picture of a struggling human, someone struggling with her new understanding of what it can mean to be human. For her, trauma is second-guessing her smallest decisions, losing control with the people she loves, obsessively recalling nasty internet comments, arranging and rearranging her life for unpredictable court dates. Healing is joining a comedy group and remembering that she can be the center of attention for who she is, not for what has happened to her. It’s reminding herself to eat until her body can remind her on its own. It’s allowing a yoga instructor to touch her.

After Brock Turner’s sentencing, his family and friends lamented his lost dreams of swimming, of becoming a surgeon, an engineer. “They spoke as if his future was waiting for him to step into it,” Miller observes. “Most of us understand that your future is not promised you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make.”

For Miller, her impact statement helped connect her past and future, albeit on a scale she never could’ve imagined. “I thought of the man in the thick black jacket, sitting by the tracks in the foldout chair, hired to save lives. I realized, since I was seventeen, that was the job I wanted. The only difference was that I sat on a chair at home, writing…if you come on the worst day of your life, my hope is to catch you, to gently guide you back.” Chanel Miller’s battles, her joy, her voice, are hers, not stand-ins for anyone else’s. That’s precisely why so many readers will identify with her.

—Jennifer Helinek's reviews have also appeared in Kirkus and The Millions. Amongst other nondescript qualities, she works in publishing and lives in New York.