Know My Name: A Memoir
by Chanel Miller
She took her name back from the case.
For you if
you've watched a survivor get cross-examined by strangers online and wondered what it costs her
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$19 MSRP · Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Chanel Miller wrote this book to take her name back from "Emily Doe." The memoir follows the Stanford case through a trial that spent its energy on her drinking, a light sentence for the man, and a victim impact statement that eleven million people read in four days. She writes the cost in small details: the family, the job, the long work of becoming a person again after being a case. It is the person standing behind the pattern Sexual Citizens maps, and it refuses to let her stay a pseudonym.
Where This Book Lives
Content note: describes a sexual assault and its aftermath.
Part of a Reading Journey
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Icarus(2017)
dir. Bryan Fogel
A doping experiment turns into a defection story.
A filmmaker testing performance-enhancing drugs on himself connects with a Russian anti-doping scientist, whose confession blows open a state-sponsored Olympic doping scheme.
Why it’s here: Started as one man's amateur doping experiment and ended up exposing state-run Olympic fraud, because the scientist he recruited to help became the whistleblower instead. Neither of them planned for that, and the film is honest about how much of it was luck.
Last Exit to Brooklyn(1989)
dir. Uli Edel
The American Dream's discarded people.
In 1950s Brooklyn, a closeted union organizer, a teenage sex worker, and a pregnant factory girl move through interlocking stories of poverty, violence, and desperation during a labor strike. Adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in refusing any redemptive arc — this is 1950s Brooklyn stripped of nostalgia, populated by people crushed by poverty, homophobia, and violence with no way out. Pedagogical, with a real content warning, in showing what "the good old days" actually cost the people the myth left out.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Boys & Sex
Peggy Orenstein
Ask boys about sex. Then listen.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Nineteen Minutes
Jodi Picoult
The novel that asks who made the shooter.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus
Jennifer S. Hirsch & Shamus Khan
Not a few bad men. A system that works.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson
Silence gets loud.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
