A widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies from shame from a key intersectional feminist thinker of a new generation
It occurred to me that the thing that made me the sickest, the thing that made me suffer most, was the fact that I felt so compelled to hide what had been done to me. Because I believed it was all my fault.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley didn't tell a soul when she was raped aged fifteen. Then, eighteen months after she was attacked, her body began to turn on her - and what followed were sudden bouts of searing, unbearable pain that saw her in and out of hospital for the next ten years.
At twenty-five, Lucia for the first time told the truth about her rape. This disclosure triggered an endless series of appointments with doctors, trauma specialists and therapists. Meanwhile, Lucia threw herself into researching the shadowy intricacies of abuse, trauma and shame.
In My Body Keeps Your Secrets, Lucia shares the voices of women and trans and non-binary people around the world, as well as her own deeply moving testimony. She writes of vulnerability, acceptance and the reclaiming of our selves, all in defiance of a world where atrocities are committed and survivors are repeatedly told to carry the weight of that shame.
Widely researched and boldly argued, this book reveals the secrets our bodies bury deep within them, the way trauma can rewrite our biology, and how our complicated relationships with sex affect our connection with others. Crafted in a daring and immersive literary form, My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a necessary, elegant and empathetic work that further establishes Lucia's credentials as a key intersectional feminist thinker for a new generation.
About the Author
Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a journalist, essayist, writer, and legal researcher. Her news reporting has appeared in ABC News, Guardian, Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Women's Agenda. Her long-form writing has appeared in The Lifted Brow and Meanjin.
Industry Reviews
'A work of astonishing compassion, insight, and care.' Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries
'An extraordinary achievement, told with such clarity and anger, so much truth, but also with such love and hope and vulnerability.' Sophie Mackintosh, author of Booker-longlisted The Water Cure and Blue Ticket
'This book brilliantly interrogates our relationship to our bodies but also to those around us, inhabiting each daily, hourly, minute-by-minute contradiction that having a body, and so being alive, entails. A testament to the power of externalising our own stories so as to understand them through others' eyes, demonstrating how inextricably connected each of us ultimately is. Her writing is beautiful, unflinching and clear and, most importantly, it renders shame visible - a material thing that, having been sewn into the body, can also be cast off ' Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy (shortlisted for Salerno European Book Award and Collyer Bristow Prize), Exposure and Asylum Roa
'This book is a burning manifesto for the revolutionary act of articulating shame and trauma. It is a testament to the feminist praxis of listening to each other's stories in collective solidarity as a refusal of erasure and a way to claim presence and power in the world.' Jessica Andrews, author of Portico Prize-winning novel Saltwater
'Through the stories of women and non-binary people about abuse and recovery, as well as her own experience of sexual assault and chronic pain, Lucia Osborne-Crowley reaches the depths of haunting secrets locked into the body, and exposes the connection between untreated trauma, inflicted shame and long-term illness.' Nataliya Deleva, Author of Peroto Literary Award-winning novel Four Minutes
