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A memoir of secondary trauma and the fragile work of healing
Thomas Trezise, a professor of French, was working on a book one morning in southern France when his wife, on a walk in the surrounding countryside, was sexually assaulted and nearly murdered. Here Trezise revisits the challenges of supporting a survivor when his own life was forever changed by the event. He closely examines secondary trauma, in which grief, fear, and anger carry no clear public recognition and little permission to speak. While drawing attention to the overlooked distress of those who stand by survivors, he questions his own masculinity in a world where the vast majority of sex crimes are committed by men. With emotional clarity and psychological insight, Beginning Again recounts the struggle to rebuild a life despite marital and social strains, professional turmoil, and the unfamiliarity of the French legal system. And it highlights how post-traumatic experience can change the very stories told to make sense of it, describing the author’s joy at becoming a father and his discovery, through the culture of Martinique and Guadeloupe, of a renewed relationship with France.
“Thomas Trezise's graceful and deeply honest examination of how he responded to a brutal assault on his wife—his internal conflicts, self-blame, fear, and anger—will be of immense value to other men who have experienced the same horror. A powerful argument that violence against women is not a woman's problem alone, but one that belongs to us all.”—Helen Benedict, author of Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes
“This is a man’s story and a husband’s story. It begins when the author’s wife is raped, strangled, and left for dead in a ravine in the French countryside. The assault has never stopped reverberating in his mind. Words like ‘trigger’ and ‘resilience’ can’t begin to convey the depth of feeling and self-knowledge Trezise shares with his readers as he watches himself, over three decades, grow to understand his own part in their shared trauma and recovery. What do we owe to our partners and to ourselves? How are intellectual passions sparked by life experience? Trezise brings to this story an uncompromising honesty and emotional rigor. His essential book builds hope amidst the ruins.”—Alice Kaplan, author of French Lessons: A Memoir
“Beginning Again opened my mind and my heart to dimensions of human existence that had escaped me. By exploring his inner life as the husband of a rape survivor, the father of a son, a scholar, and a man questioning the norms of masculinity, Trezise enables us to both feel and understand the reach of secondary trauma. At once necessary and fully realized, his memoir generates deep comprehension as well as profound emotion.”—Stéphane Gerson, author of Disaster Falls: A Family Story