I Choose Elena: On Trauma, Memory and Survival

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Aged 15 and on track to be an Olympic gymnast, Lucia Osborne-Crowley was violently raped on a night out, sparking a series of events that left her devastatingly ill for more than ten years of her life. Her path to healing began a decade later, when she told someone about her rape for the very first time. Eventually finding solace in writers like Elena Ferrante, this is a work about rediscovering vulnerability and resilience in the face of formerly unbearable trauma.

The author explores what has been proved, but is not yet widely known, about trauma, bringing to our attention, its cyclical, intergenerational nature: how trauma intersects with deeply-held beliefs about the credibility of women: and how trauma is played out again and again i the fabric of our cultures, governments, judicial systems, and relationships.

'If you buy one book today let it be this one...It moved me to tears and to anger.' Daisy Johnson,author of Everything Under

'This book is burrowed deep under my skin.' Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater

Reviews

"A fierce, eloquent meditation on trauma, #MeToo, the body, pain and memory." --Sinad Gleeson, author, Constellations

"Thank-you Lucia Osborne-Crowley for writing I Choose Elena, for your bold and precise testimony on the devastation of sexual violence, on the body's extraordinary and destructive compulsion to contain its own trauma. Every one of the insights you share is extremely hard-won, and I am so grateful to you for putting them into this incredible book." --Rosie Price, author, What Red Was

"This book burrowed deep under my skin. A searing, potent testament to the vital necessity of articulation in the struggle for women to own their bodies and find a language to talk about violence and trauma." --Jessica Andrews, author, Saltwater

"Beautiful and sad and moving and too real in the finest way." --Irish Times
"Startlingly intelligent, disturbing, profound and moving, I Choose Elena shows us that the #MeToo movement has grown roots, and that for survivors of rape and sexual assault, the revolution is just beginning. Osborne-Crowley gives us darkness wrought in light and the hope she offers is as palpable as it is hard-won." April Ayers Lawson, author, Virgin and Other Stories

Author Bio

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a writer and journalist. Her news reporting and literary work has appeared inGranta, theSunday Times, HuffPost UK,theGuardian, ABC News, Meanjin, The Lifted Browand others. Lucia works as a staff reporter forLaw360.

I Choose Elenais her first book. Her second book,My Body Keeps Your Secrets:Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation, was published on 2 September 2021.