2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANGELA CURRIN
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THE COURAGE TO FACE YOUR TRUTH a review by Loren Ashten Rachael Brooks. Beads: A Memoir about Falling Apart and Putting Yourself Back Together Again. Köehler Books, 2019.
LOREN ASHTEN earned her BS in Cellular/Molecular Biology from East Carolina University and is currently pursuing her MA in English and Creative Writing. She worked as an NCLR editorial assistant and now teaches composition. She is an LGBTQ rights advocate, having spoken in 130 classes across North Carolina, including at ECU, Pitt Community College, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State University. She has published fiction and nonfiction in After the Art and The Dewdrop and has poetry forthcoming in Aurora Anthology. RACHAEL BROOKS earned her bachelor’s in Business and master’s in Accounting from UNC Chapel Hill. She is a former tax accountant and first-time author, who now serves as an advocate in the Survivor Speaker’s Bureau where she continues to join others in courageously sharing their experience as survivors of sexual violence and rape.
Whether through transforming personal experiences into the plotlines of fiction, voicing personal beliefs and opinions in a rhetorical essay, or splaying open a painful memory in a heartfelt memoir, writers often face ugly truths about the world around them as they relive difficult times. In her gutwrenchingly candid memoir, Beads, Rachael Brooks doesn’t hesitate to take readers to the root of her story from the first page of the preface: “Someone wise once said to write what you know. I was raped when I was twenty-two” (xv). Brooks leads readers through her experience, step by step, as she recounts in detail the events of the night she was raped and the four years she spent seeking justice and closure necessary to her healing. She paints a vivid picture for readers of what such a trauma is like and the process that is the reassembling of one’s self afterwards. She states, “My life felt like scattered beads all over the floor . . . moving in different directions . . . some you just stop looking for but find many years later” (26). A theme explored throughout the memoir is the precarious redirection one event can inflict upon a life, how one selfish act can irreversibly change a person forever. However, Brooks makes it abun-
dantly clear that there is hope in the turmoil. There is a way to transmute the ugliness of sexual trauma and turn it into something usable in the end: “I had this horrible thing happen to me, but there is beauty in how it shaped me into the person I am today” (xv), she writes. This year’s issues of NCLR explore the role of writing in healing. Brooks’s memoir, in the most brutal, honest, and practical way, reflects the whole point of what it means to write your healing into reality, to reach deep within yourself and take back what was stolen and, even if you don’t have all the missing pieces to do so, to determine in your mind that you are once again whole anyway. “The other side is what has given [Brooks] the courage to write this and hopefully will give you the courage to read it." She says it is her "version of a self-help book” (xvi). She broaches her subject with a conversational style that delivers her truth with candor and vulnerability. Nothing is left openended, to be misunderstood, or shrouded in obscure metaphor, to be lost to misinterpretation. Some writers consider it a duty of their work to find innovative and artistic ways of framing the ugliness of the world, to beautify and make presentable something horrible,