Recommendations
Books Like Know My Name
Best books to read after Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Know My Name reclaims a person from the legal system's reduction of her to a symbol. These 8 books share its examination of sexual violence and its aftermath, its critique of how institutions fail survivors, and its insistence on the survivor's full humanity before and after the event that the legal system defined her by.
- 1Buy
Men Explain Things to Me
by Rebecca Solnit
Solnit's 2014 essays — particularly 'The Longest War' and 'Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite' — provide the structural analysis of violence against women and the credibility deficit that women face when reporting sexual violence that is the intellectual framework for understanding everything that happened to Chanel Miller in the Brock Turner case.
- 2Buy
Lucky
by Alice Sebold
Sebold's 1999 memoir about being raped as a freshman at Syracuse University and the criminal trial that followed is the most direct predecessor to Know My Name in the memoir tradition — both books follow a survivor through the legal process and its aftermath, both explore the way the trial forces survivors to prove their credibility, and both are ultimately about reclaiming the self from the story the assault imposed on it.
- 3Buy
Hunger
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2017 memoir about how gang rape at twelve shaped her relationship to food and to her body is the most direct parallel to Know My Name in the tradition of memoir about surviving sexual violence — both books are unsparing about the long aftermath of assault, both refuse the narrative of clean recovery, and both insist on the survivor's full personhood as the frame through which the assault must be understood.
- 4Buy
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
by Erika L. Sánchez
Sánchez's 2017 YA novel about a Mexican-American girl in Chicago whose sister has died and who is trying to find out what her sister was hiding is a natural companion for younger readers of Know My Name — both are about a young woman refusing the identity that others have assigned to her, and both use the form of a coming-of-age story to address the specific pressures that women face in negotiating their own autonomy.
- 5Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Westover's 2018 memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in Idaho and educating herself out of that world is the most widely read memoir of the period in the tradition of reclaiming a self that others have tried to define — Know My Name and Educated are the two defining memoirs of their generation about young women fighting to be known on their own terms.
- 6Buy
In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado's 2019 memoir about an abusive relationship with a woman is a formal companion to Know My Name in that both books use structural experimentation — genre frames for Machado, the art and illustration that interrupt Miller's narrative — to capture experience that conventional linear memoir cannot hold, and both are concerned with the way institutions fail to see and protect women from intimate violence.
- 7Buy
Just Mercy
by Bryan Stevenson
Stevenson's 2014 account of the American criminal justice system from the perspective of defense attorneys working with the wrongly convicted and the condemned provides the structural context for understanding how the legal process in the Brock Turner case worked — not as an exceptional failure but as the routine operation of a system that consistently prioritizes the defendant's future over the survivor's harm.
- 8Buy
The Body Keeps the Score
by Bessel van der Kolk
Van der Kolk's 2014 account of trauma and the body — how traumatic experience is stored in and continues to shape the body long after the event — provides the psychological framework for understanding what Know My Name describes experientially: the way assault continues to live in the body and the mind, reshaping perception and memory and the sense of self, in ways that the criminal justice system is not equipped to account for or address.
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