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I Will Find You JOANNA CONNORS 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016 First published in the United States in 2016 by Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Copyright © 2016 by Joanna Connors Cover photo © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images Joanna Connors asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Epigraph quote by James Baldwin from “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The New York Times (January 14, 1962). Quote on p. 76 from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Indiana University Press, 1955), 146–48. Quote on p. 115 by James Baldwin from “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit,” Freedomways 19:4 (1979) 269–72. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. Cover design by Jonathan Pelham All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780007521869 Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007521876 Version: 2017-02-20 For Dan and Zoe, beloved And for Chris, who went through it with me It’s no surprise that the term “Rashomon effect” comes from a movie about a rape and murder. Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece (based on the work of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa) tells the story of a violent encounter in the woods through the testimony of four characters. Each one recounts a different version of what happened—including the murdered samurai, who testifies through a medium. “Rashomon effect” has become shorthand for the way perspective can alter memory. Neuroscientific research suggests that memory is not solid. It is capricious and highly susceptible to outside influence, and changes with each retrieval from the brain. The addition of trauma makes memory the ultimate unreliable narrator of our own past. I fact-checked my memories in this book with as much evidence as possible, including stacks of documents, dozens of recorded interviews, and my own journals. But I also relied on my memories. Others who experienced this trauma may, like the woodcutter or the wife in Rashomon, have other perspectives and other stories to tell. To honor their privacy, I have changed the names of some of the people in this book, and changed characteristics that might identify them.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
—James Baldwin Contents
