I Will Find You

The journalist’s “brutally affecting [and] powerful” memoir of her quest to uncover the life of the man who raped her twenty-one years earlier (Guardian, UK).   Joanna Connors was thirty years old and on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to review a college theater production when she was held at knifepoint and raped by a stranger who had grown up five miles away from her. Once her assailant was caught and sentenced, Joanna never spoke of the trauma again . . . until her daughter was about to go to college.   Resolving to tell her children about her rape, Connors began to realize that the man who assaulted her was one of the most formative people in her life. She embarked on a journey to find out who he was, who his friends were, and what his life was like. What she discovers stretches beyond one violent man’s story and back into her own, interweaving a narrative about strength and survival with one about rape culture and violence in America.  I Will Find You is a “deeply humane and harrowing” memoir, as well as a brave and timely consideration of race, class, education, and the families that shape who we become (Boston Globe).