Her Story To Tell: Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar

I picked up this book because it was described as a “#MeToo” novel, and if you’ve been reading this blog maybe you’ve noticed that I am very into books that play with narrative in order to reveal the layered psychology and sociology of rape culture. Feminist authors of the 21st century are innovating on the usual first-person unreliable narrator as a device, stretching and layering this tried-and-true artifice in order to show us the insidious workings of internalized oppression. Books like The People in the Trees, where a frame narrative and a memoir written from prison give us insight into the mental gymnastics an abuser takes to justify their actions; like Trust Exercise, where point-of-view shifts in macro and micro ways to unsettle the grounds for truth -- where, as my friend MJ put it, “the whole book is a trust exercise” and time and again we have to determine what “trust women” means in this case; and like Milkman, where syntax and nameless characters mirror a mood of spiraling paranoia and fear, once again making unreliability less about the fact of oppression and more about its conniving distortions.

I add Take Me Apart, Sara Sligar’s debut novel, to this growing family of novels interested in these psychological distortions, engendered by acts of abuse. It’s like these authors all had that cruel, mansplainy question, But why didn’t they report it then? throbbing in their ears when they sat down to craft their exquisitely structured books. Knowing that fiction can’t convince someone of fact -- after all, we have historians and journalists for that -- these women writers all understand the need to show not the fact of sexual abuse, but the feeling of it.

Take Me Apart is most fundamentally a page-turner mystery novel, a whodunnit with the classic red herrings and investigative thrills. But it’s also a story of sexual misconduct then and now: a chance to historicize a post-Weinstein world, putting the past in conversation with the present to see where there’s continuity, and where there’s change. Of course, feminists all know this struggle in our movement: what didn’t we understand then that we get now? But sometimes, as younger generations of activists, we condescend to the past, forgetting that the fight had unique dimensions and pressures then that it may have no longer. We share the same wisdom; we just feel different levels of political efficacy, or have different societal norms to work with. If you don’t believe me, read James Baldwin, read Ida B. Wells, and then read Twitter last week. Same fight, different century, right down to the need to center black women in the work of black liberation (Wells, remember, was an anti-rape and anti-lynching activist, at the same time, and she had no problem holding both of those oppressions in her head simultaneously as she constructed her politics of liberation).

Take Me Apart is most fundamentally a page-turner mystery novel, a whodunnit with the classic red herrings and investigative thrills. But it’s also a story of sexual misconduct then and now: a chance to historicize a post-Weinstein world.

The pre-Me-Too survivor of the book is Miranda Brand, famous photographer à la Cindy Sherman or Lorna Simpson. It’s weird to call her a survivor because when the book is happening, late 2010s, she’s been dead for almost 25 years. Death by apparent suicide. Enter our post-Me-Too survivor, Kate, an archivist by training who’s been hired to organize and catalogue Miranda’s papers -- which, yes, have been sitting there collecting dust and mouse poop for twenty-five years -- in order for them to be put up for auction. You can maybe see where that part is going. 

But their stories of survivorship tie them together in much deeper ways than any murder mystery plot -- ways that we wonder if Kate even perceives. Her part of the book is told in close third person, allowing just enough intimacy to know her secrets, and just enough distance to wonder why she’s keeping them. Miranda’s voice, though, we get with the immediacy and presence of first person: in the form of her diary, which we quickly learn Kate is reading in secret, since it wasn’t part of Miranda’s official papers. Miranda’s now adult son Theo, another mysterious figure in the book, has hidden the diary in his bedside table drawer. (It’s not a spoiler to say: That’s not going to stop Kate.)

We learn of Miranda’s experience of abuse through other documents stashed in Miranda’s disheveled piles. In fact, we learn of her experience before we learn of Kate’s. Why does Sligar keep knowledge of Miranda more accessible than knowledge of Kate? Maybe this is the archivist’s metaphorical struggle: always the cataloguer, never the interpreter. Kate may see the breadcrumbs of Miranda’s deepest story, but is she allowing herself to follow them?

In both of these women’s experiences of misconduct, someone with power abused it, took advantage: took, both bodily and intellectually, what was not theirs to take, but which the men took anyway, leaning on their accumulated power to gaslight the women and control the narrative. Perhaps now more than ever these stories will sound familiar, since we’ve read so many versions of them, proliferated on every form of social media and increasingly in the safe spaces we are learning how to create for one another. Maybe a movement is what happens when a story of injustice gets told enough times that suddenly, hearing it again, we recognize it.

What Sligar does by interspersing these intergenerational stories is not only dole out sexy mystery details. She wants us as readers to put together the deeper story of solidarity that exists between these two women who will never meet. It’s not just about whether Miranda’s death was a suicide -- yes, like Kate, we want to know that, too. But it’s also about the deeper existential desperation to break a cycle of silence. Our archivist can’t save Miranda’s life, and reading her diary is as painful as watching a speeding train approach a stalling car that’s stuck on the tracks. But Kate can heal herself. Perhaps that’s what we all need to do before we can heal a victim’s legacy and tell the right story, the story of a movement.