Lived Through This → Center for Story & Witness

How far would you go to tell a story?

In 2004, Voices and Faces Project founder Anne K. Ream and documentary photographer Patricia Evans embarked on a unique journey. Their goal was to document the stories of survivors who have been shaped – but refuse to be defined – by the gender-based violence they have lived through. Anne and Patricia believed that putting names and faces on an issue that too often leaves its victims silent and invisible could change the way the public sees gender-based violence. And the way that survivors of such violence see themselves.

The resulting book of narrative and photographic profiles – Lived Through This: Listening to the Stories of Sexual Violence Survivors – is the end result of their journey. Part personal history of Anne’s experience rebuilding her own life in the wake of violence, part memoir of a multi-year, multi-country journey spent listening to survivors, Lived Through This is at once deeply personal, and resolutely political. The survivors profiled in the pages of Lived Through This aren’t sharing their testimonies because doing so is healing—although it can be—but because it is necessary in a world that too often underestimates the scope and scale of gender-based violence in the US, and beyond our borders.

Heart-stopping, beautifully rendered stories of survivors powerfully illustrating the notion that when we tell our stories, we change the story.

EVE ENSLER

Author of In the Body of the World

Lived Through This is a heartbreaking book that is also hopeful in its belief that people’s stories matter. Its most beautiful virtue is that it’s not the story of a series of assaults; it’s the story of a community of survivors who found the courage to share one part — one enormous part — of their history.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Ream’s greatest accomplishment is her book’s considerable humanism, giving each survivor a three-dimensional life and personality that transcends the stigma too often attached to rape. Each individual story commands attention; assembled as a collection, they positively demand it.

PUBLISHERS WEEKELY

Let’s talk:The Lived Through This discussion guide.

Powerful books create important conversations. The Lived Through This discussion guide was developed to help readers think differently – and deeply – about gender-based violence, while encouraging them to ask key questions about each of the stories in the book. Developed by the trauma-informed team at The Voices and Faces Project, the discussion guide can serve as a helpful resource for literary book groups and survivor support groups. It is also an excellent training tool for rape crisis counselors, therapists in private practice, and direct service providers seeking to better understand and serve those whose lives have been impacted by sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and trafficking.

From the page to the stage: Lived Through This is adapted for the theater.

Called “heartfelt and beautifully rendered” by playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler), Anne K. Ream’s Lived Through This is a narrative and photographic memoir of a multi-country journey spent listening to survivors of gender-based violence. Published in 2014 and featuring the photography of Patricia Evans, Lived Through This has since been adapted for the stage through a collaboration between Ream and award-winning playwrights Marilyn Campbell and Caity-Shea Violette and director Ann Filmer (Steppenwolf Theatre, Goodman Theatre). The played debuted at Chicago’s Piven Theatre featuring live musical performances of the rock ’n’ roll playlist that helped the book’s author heal. The staged reading of Lived Through This has since traveled to theaters in New York City, Chicago, and Virginia, through our ongoing collaboration with Virginia Stage Company.

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