Two dark tales

Just over halfway through this grim and gripping book, the author describes herself and her girlfriend ‘lying on my bed kissing’. She says: ‘I love kissing her.’ And: ‘We kissed and kissed, and soon my hands were at her shirt and I was tugging it off.’ And: ‘I kissed her again.’ And: ‘I reached down between her legs.’ And: ‘She reached down to touch me and then we were moving together and it felt good and I moaned and it felt good again.’

Then she says: ‘And then it didn’t.’

The sex feels good. Then it doesn’t. Something has happened to the author, deep in her past, and it comes back to haunt her. ‘I realised I was going under, into the memory,’ she tells us. ‘My breath quickened. I gulped air. I fumbled for something to hold on to.’

In this passage, she’s telling us how sexual trauma actually feels​. And let me say: I haven’t read anything quite like this before. Anybody who reads this, who didn’t know how sexual trauma feels — how it plays out across the years, how it can rear up and grab a person decades after the event, or events — will have a much better idea now.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich has thought very hard about sexual trauma. She really, really wants to tell us about it. Very few people do.

But let’s back up a bit. This book is partly about the sexual trauma that happened to Marzano-Lesnevich when she was a child. But it’s also about a case that she worked on when she was training to be a lawyer. The case concerns a man called Ricky Langley and a boy called Jeremy Guillory. Ricky killed Jeremy. The case is horrible; it will appal you.