I Will Find You by Joanna Connors review – a brutally affecting investigation

Connors, a reporter, has written a book has two purposes: to convey how rape is experienced by a victim and to delve into the life of her attacker in an attempt to explain what he did

In July 1984 Joanna Connors, a critic for the Cleveland (Ohio) paper the Plain Dealer, went to the city’s university theatre to interview a playwright. She arrived late, and he had gone. But there was somebody else waiting for her. David Francis, a lifelong offender who had just been released from prison, had let himself in. He put a makeshift knife to her throat, and for the next two hours he raped her every which way he could. When they at last stepped back out into the daylight he warned her not to go to the police. “If I have to go to prison, I will miss you,” he said. “And when I get out, I will find you.” Then he kissed her on the lips and walked away.

Connors started work on this brutally affecting book more than 20 years later. During that time she had buried the trauma and busied herself with the stuff of everyday life: working, home improvements, raising her son and daughter, who were both born in the years following the attack. She had experienced bouts of depression and agoraphobia, hovering anxiously over her children and rarely leaving the house. But it was only when she had a panic attack while taking her teenage daughter Zoe to look around a university campus that she confronted the depth of her trauma. Fear had, she realised, come to dominate her life and those of her children. To overcome it, she decided to turn Francis’s threat back on him: she would find him, and try to make sense of what he had done to her.

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