This is How I Speak: The Diary of a Young Woman

To read someone's most intimate thoughts can seem an invasion -- unless they publish them as a book. At times I still felt as though I was invading the author's privacy but this was an unexpected look into the very intimate details of a "place in time" for this young woman. Very interesting read.

The author, then 25, finds her place as a dancer and a writer as she struggles to overcome a sexual assault set up by a close friend. The diary form maintains the youthful voice with its passions and questions in a way that an older, wiser narrator-looking-back could not. Written with aching clarity, the book captures what it is to be 25, to be violated and to find one's strength for the first time.

It's difficult to easily categorize This Is How I Speak: The Diary Of A Young Woman. It is somewhere between a diary, biography, literary memoir and confessional lies a captivating story of one woman's winning literary achievements and her recovery from a sexual assault. Her diary is filled with insight, from her work in the arts to her blossoming skills and identity. This Is How I Speak is an absorbing, high-impact coverage.

The Diary of Anais Nin meets The Paper Chase is this intimate, entertaining and moving portrait of an ambitious dancer turned writer coping with love, loss, sex, competition, endless Seattle rain, and a bad therapist at one of the nation's leading creative writing programs. THIS IS HOW I SPEAK offers a little bit of something for everyone--stories about relationships, about ambition, about the pain of sexual assault, about healing, about finding one's own voice in a world already filled with the voices of others.