BOOK & STAGED READING

Lived Through This: Listening to the Stories of Sexual Violence Survivors

How far would you go to tell a story?

In 2004, Center for Story & Witness Co-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.

Anne K. Ream’s Lived Through This is a book of heart stopping, beautifully rendered stories of survivors powerfully illustrating the notion that when we tell our stories, we change the story.”

V (formerly Eve Ensler)

Author of The Vagina Monologues

In Lived Through This, Anne K. Ream’s greatest accomplishment is the 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.

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

A captivating, divers collection of survivors. Lived Through This is revelatory … a book graced with hope, humanity and compassion (featuring) brave and resilient victims who, in the words of the author, ‘have been shaped, but refuse to be defined, by their histories of violence.’

KIRKUS REVIEWS

This book’s most beautiful virtue is that it is not the story of 18 assaults; it’s the story of 18 humans. Humans who found the courage to share one part — one enormous part — of their history with us, in the hopes we’d hear them. I hope we find the courage to listen.

HEIDI STEVENS

The Chicago Tribune

Anne K. Ream poignantly shows that sexual violence isn’t about statistics; it’s about survival. The courage of the survivors in Lived Through This will inspire you and leave you wanting to do more to end the violence that touches nearly every family in America.

SCOTT BERKOWITZ

President and founder of RAINN

A captivating, divers collection of survivors. Lived Through This is revelatory … a book graced with hope, humanity and compassion (featuring) brave and resilient victims who, in the words of the author, ‘have been shaped, but refuse to be defined, by their histories of violence.’

MAILE ZAMBUTO

CEO, Joyful Heart Foundation

Anne K. Ream has turned a personal trauma into a rallying call. Her book shatters every stereotype about those who are targets of abuse, and how they came to be so. This is an author who understands that the struggle to end abuse is not about gender but about common humanity.

JIMMIE BRIGGS

Author of Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War

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 Center for Story & Witness, 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 has been 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.

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