Lucia Osborne-Crowley

In her first full-length book, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of the acclaimed Mood Indigo essay I Choose Elena, writes about the secrets a woman's body keeps, from puberty to menstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation. Through the voices of women around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, My Body Keeps Your Secrets tells the story of the young woman's body in 2021. Moving from girlhood and adolescence to young womanhood, Osborne-Crowley establishes her credentials as a key feminist thinker of a new generation with this widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies in the age of social media.

My Body Keeps Your Secrets

Aged 15 and preparing for her second Gymnastics World Championship, Lucia Osborne-Crowley was violently raped on a night out. The injuries she sustained ended her gymnastics career, and eventually manifested in chronic illness, which medical professionals now believe can be caused by untreated trauma. Her path to healing began a decade later when she shared her secret for the very first time. Finding solace in writers like Elena Ferrante and Rupi Kaur, she learned how to express her suffering and began to rediscover vulnerability and resilience in the face of a formerly unbearable trauma. Her investigations reveal profound societal failures--of law, justice, education, and medicine--and suggest only empathy can break the cycle of sexual violence. Eloquent, defiant, and honest, I Choose Elena is the story of how a young woman reclaimed her body.

On Trauma, Memory and Survival

I Choose Elena

In her first full-length book, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of the acclaimed Mood Indigo essay I Choose Elena, writes about the secrets a woman’s body keeps, from puberty to menstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation. Through the voices of women around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, My Body Keeps Your Secrets tells the story of the young woman’s body in 2021. Moving from girlhood and adolescence to young womanhood, Osborne-Crowley establishes her credentials as a key feminist thinker of a new generation with this widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies in the age of social media.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley

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