The Other Side

May 12, 2014
This riveting narrative of a young woman's kidnapping and rape at the hands of a former boyfriend moves fluently between dissociation and healing. Johnson, an attractive young woman from a rural Midwestern family, worked briefly as a model in New York before attending college. While in school, she became infatuated with her Spanish teacher, a Venezuelan-American twice her age, who was worldly and traveled but also had some serious emotional damage from his first marriage. She grew to both love and fear the man; he exhibited a startlingly cruel and violent streak, striking her and even killing their sick cat. With her fragile sense of self, she craved validation, despite his ill treatment. "I want him to love me," she declares, and "I'll do anything to stay with him." The two eventually broke up, and on the night of July 5, 2000, he stalked her and tricked her into coming to his apartment, where he raped her. Johnson's narrative is her attempt to claim the memory. She returns to the police record, and distances herself from her own body by having successive relationships and getting tattoos. Her evocation of emotional mayhem underscores the violent power play that can be present in unequal pairings.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
In this riveting memoir, Johnson (Trespasses, 2012) writes of falling prey to an act of terrifying violence and its aftermath.In 2000, the author's former boyfriend kidnapped her and held her captive, raped her and threatened her with death. Though she eventually escaped, it took years to free herself from the emotional and psychological damage she suffered. "Even what the mind forgets, the body remembers," she writes. Written in an urgent first-person, present-tense voice, the narrative takes readers through the fear and rage as the writer lived it. Her painful memories, released in a nonlinear fashion, cut like shards of glass. It was 13 years after her abduction before she could get herself to go through the police report of her case. She read that the owner of the building where the crime took place was a friend of "The Man She Used To Live With" (perhaps for anonymity and to get some emotional distance, Johnson uses titles instead of names throughout the book) and would not reveal to the police where he had gone. The author also discovered that her attacker paid a student $100 to help him build the soundproof cell in which she was held. Later, she learned that her predator escaped to Venezuela, where he has family. Though she has lived in fear that he would contact her again, she writes, life went on. She got married, received a doctorate and had two children, and she has continued to fight depression, panic and emotional withdrawal. "I'm trapped on the other side of a wide, dark chasm," she tells her husband. Writing the truth is her way to the other side. "This story tells me who I am. It gives me meaning," she writes. "And I want to mean something so badly."Ferociously beautiful and courageous, Johnson's intimate story sheds light on the perpetuation of violence against women.

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May 15, 2014
Bad things have happened to Johnson, and she replays them here, sometimes in chronological order, sometimes not. She has lived through a lotpoor choices, wretched boyfriends and unsuitable husbands, pills, therapistsbut mainly, kidnapping and rape by a man she once loved. Still, she persists. The men she engages with are not given names but titles (My Handsome Friend, The Man I Live With, My First Husband). So, too, is her family distantly identified (My Older Sister, etc.). Johnson focuses on how she felt, what happened, and what she saw. This is a grim, years-long ride as Johnson details her choices, her loss of feeling and initiative, her troubled dreams, her relentless acceptance of physical and sexual abuse, even as she works her way to graduate school. She has a story to tell, but the best question of the book, posed by her grandmother to My Boyfriend, is, Now tell me: what kind of man are you? It remains unanswered as Johnson moves back to the kidnapping, now 4 years past, now 13 years past. Johnson asks, Am I not endlessly circling? She is, but her obsessive, aloof, yet graphic self-portrait still aims for catharsis.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)