Edgy author returns

Halse Anderson shocked readers with a book about rape. She’s at it again.

Long before there was #MeToo, there was Speak. Published in 1999, Laurie Halse Anderson’s semi-autobiographical novel about rape was a bestseller and later a movie starring Kristen Stewart. It remains revered and controversial, with a spot on the American Library Association’s most-bannedbooks list.

Now Anderson is stepping up to the microphone again, this time with a little more anger and a little more candour. Her new book, to be published in March by Viking Children’s Books, is called Shout, and in it she writes not only about her own experience as a rape victim but also about the pain and heartache readers have shared with her in the two decades since Speak appeared.

In the intervening years, Anderson has addressed untold numbers of young people about sexual assault. She has shared her own experience of being raped at 13, one year younger than the protagonist in Speak, and how, like her, she kept silent about it. (Anderson waited 25 years before telling a therapist what happened to her.)

Going public has turned Anderson into something of a confessor. “I have not spoken at an event where one or two people haven’t come up to me in tears afterward,” she said.

The notes come to her through email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — even on crumpled pieces of paper handed to her after events. The message is almost always the same: Me too.

Anderson typically directs young people to groups such as RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) and encourages them to talk to safe adults. But given the outpouring — amplified in part by the #MeToo movement — she felt a need to do more.

“I see my responsibility as helping people move away from ‘me too’ to ‘us too,’” she says.

Anderson began working on Shout in October of last year and says it came more quickly than any of her other books, which include Chains, a National Book Award finalist; Wintergirls; The Impossible Knife of Memory; and others, including a graphic novel version of Speak. Anderson’s books have sold more than eight million copies.

Anderson expects Shout — aimed at high school students and up — will be challenged just as Speak still is by some readers who object to its unvarnished discussion of sexuality and violence. But Anderson, now 56 and a grandmother, is undaunted.

“All of those teenagers were kind to talk to me,” she says. “They educated me.”

She sees Shout as a kind of thank-you note to them and a “shot of advice about how liberating it is when you write about what you’ve been through.”