I Will Find You

Starred review from January 4, 2016
In this gripping memoir, Connors, a reporter for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, reckons with trauma after rape. In 1984, while Connors was on a reporting assignment in Cleveland, she was raped by a stranger. After 30 years, she goes on a quest to uncover the personal story of David, the man who raped her, and in the process encounters the stories of brutality faced by David’s family as they experience poverty and racism. Connors talks with David’s siblings, who reveal their own trauma and exposure to violence at the hands of an abusive father and a broken legal system that over-incarcerates poor people of color. She examines the racial politics of Cleveland as she crosses geographic divisions between rich and poor neighborhoods, seeking out David’s family. This book is a powerful story of exposing and confronting emotional scars in order to move forward. With emotional honesty and the precision of a seasoned journalist, Connors explores her own trials coping with the aftermath of rape, which leave the imprint of a constant fear and lead her to mistrust even close family members. Connors’s astute reflections on race, gender, and the personal plight of victimhood make this book a must-read.

January 1, 2016
A journalist's harrowing account of how, over the course of more than three decades, she came to terms with an experience of rape. On a July day in 1984, Connors, then a theater critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, was on the Case Western Reserve University campus. While looking for a playwright she had to interview, Connors came across a young man who raped her at knife point. In this book, the author revisits that episode and tells the story of how the event permanently changed her. To survive the rape and, later, police questioning and the physical examination that followed, she temporarily dissociated, becoming like a spectator watching "a girl in a play." Even after police caught the rapist, David Williams, and sent him to prison, the ordeal continued. Her husband--who considered hiring a hit man to kill Williams--became the object of the rage she had felt about her situation. Connors developed a severe case of PTSD, which made her pathologically fearful for her safety as well as that of her two children. Williams died in 2000, 16 years after the incident; yet his death did not alleviate Connors' suffering. Desperate to find the "narrative that would make sense of my rape and explain...what forces led us to that spot where we collided," she began to investigate her rapist's life. Through interviews with his family members and crime victims, Connors learned that Williams and his siblings grew up in a brutally dysfunctional household. Rather than see Williams as a monster for what he did, the author developed compassion for him, for his "tragic" family, and, most of all, for herself. Powerful and compelling, the book is a highly personal examination of the volatile intersection of race, poverty, and violence. The author insightfully reflects on the idea that the greatest monster anyone, including victims of violent crime, must face is the monster within. A courageous and unsettlingly forthright memoir of overcoming trauma.

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Starred review from April 1, 2016
Rape. It is a harsh reality for so many1 in 5 women, 1 in 71 men. It is tough to write about it, and to read about it, and worse to experience. Far worse. Connors handles her rape story as only a survivor, and a crackerjack journalist, can. Two decades after being raped at knifepoint while on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Connors decided she had a need to know that outweighed her long-held need to forget. So she set out to locate her attacker, face him, and find out who he is, who he was, and, maybe, why their fates crossed on a hot July day in 1984. Her account of the event itself is raw and unnerving, even as it is filtered through words on a page. Even words, as much as they convey, can only go so far. But through her writing we do get a visceral glimpse of her pain, her fear, her wrongfully felt shame, and the anguish at loose in the world in which rape is a heinous everyday occurrence, one that wounds both victim and perpetrator. If a reader is looking for the most candid, most powerful true book about rape, let Connors' be the one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)