Shout

“This is the story of a girl who lost herself and wrote herself a new one.” 

Anderson begins the book with this statement to prepare the reader for the arc her memoir will take. Her story was interrupted in her adolescence when she was raped, but the book details her climb out of despair during the aftermath, while also serving as a call to help other survivors of sexual assault. This line also hints at Anderson’s relationship to her protagonist Melinda in Speak, who loses her voice after she is sexually assaulted. Anderson writes the novel to give that voice back to Melinda, as well as herself.

“The image of my father hitting / my mother picassoed in front of me / like Sunday sunshine slicing/through the church windows, fracturing / and rearranging the truth on the floor.” 

Here, Anderson tells her parents’ story about a moment in which her father abused and severely injured her mother. Although she did not actually witness this moment, Anderson conjures an image of this violence occurring in a church-like place, which is significant since her father is a preacher. Anderson has to create a new language for this particular event, referring to her mother’s face as “picassoed,” meaning she is so broken that she looks similar to the work of the artist Pablo Picasso. Truth is not literally fractured on the floor. This phrase is meant figuratively—both parents later refuse to speak of the event, or when they do, they cover up its severity, in one of the many lies by omission Anderson reveals.