The story Little tells about herself unfolds with devastating low points and transcendent high points, at a pace that makes the memoir into a page-turner. Imagine your coolest, funniest, most centered friend opening her heart to you over a luxurious, healthy meal, telling you stories that speak directly to your experiences of having a body that grows and breaks. She likes it when her husband notices her body. She has awkward run-ins with her ex-therapist. She fights with her mother at family gatherings. Memoirist Marcy Little is immediately, identifiably relatable. It tells the story of a woman’s journey toward deeper self-awareness by using well-crafted storytelling to offer sustained, insightful reflection that extends beyond the narrative. “Marcy Little’s Naked: My Body’s Story delivers the pleasures of the popular woman’s self-help memoir genre while distinguishing itself in several meaningful ways. Associate Professor specializing in Developmental Psychology As we heal ourselves, so to do we heal this mixed-up world.”
![cast of my secret identity cast of my secret identity](https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/jack-nicholson-wolf-movie-werewolf.jpg)
As individuals, we all need to “do our work.” Little is clearly doing hers, and in the doing, inspires us to do the same. Instead, with tremendous courage and vulnerability, she tells her story in a way we can all relate to, as fellow humans on the path to wholeness and integration. Little doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. This journey is in the living, and the living of it can be messy. Much like Ensler’s In the Body of the World, Little’s Naked holds nothing back, yet unlike many popular memoirs or how-to titles, Little’s is a true hero’s journey-one that isn’t buttoned up, figured out, clean, resolved, and ready to store on the back shelf. This honest and true chronicle of healing sexual abuse pushed me to my own edges, made me reflect on past traumas I thought I had resolved, and question their lasting impact on my body and in my relationships. Even with my background in psychology and human development, Little’s account was a revelation. Little’s personal story does a service to other women who have survived trauma. “ Naked is raw, unapologetic, and relatable. An attempt to capture cellular level healing through a deep exploration of the contours of my own perplexing sexuality as a survivor of sexual trauma and abuse. Like so many women, things can still get really confusing in my body and my mind.įor a year, I studied myself, stayed with questions, listened deeply, and wrote it all down. Like so many women, I still struggle with intimacy and boundaries. Like so many women, this early trauma still has a grasp on many aspects of my life, on many aspects of myself. Like so many women, I am a survivor of sexual trauma and abuse. Thirty years to confront the pain encased in my cells. It takes me thirty years to understand what happened to me. Some other person has taken over my body and is going through the motions. While at my stepfather’s place, my secret sex partner and I end up in the tub, naked, trying out things we heard about or saw in movies. I just stopped in for a snack on my way into Binghamton,” I lie. We break into my stepfather’s small apartment during the day while he is at work, make toast and slice butter off the top of the stick instead of the front (a dead giveaway I have been there). Moving through an unconscious cloud, I find myself secretly having sex with one of my sister’s girlfriend’s boyfriends. I go with this new flow, engage in intercourse with teenage boys as clueless as I am. Any notion of innate worthiness, however small, I might have garnered in my childhood innocence has been stolen-cast aside permanently. But I wasn’t reading any of these textbooks.
I was a child on the cusp of blossoming into a young woman.Īfter I was raped, I became sexually promiscuous. To this, add my premenstrual stage of development. No woman vomiting from intoxication can give consent. Can a fifteen-year-old virgin puking in the toilet because she’s drunk give consent to a twenty-two-year-old man?