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I Will Find You

a Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her
Jun 25, 2016mswrite rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I winced a lot as I read "I Will Find You," but I am glad I read it and I'm very glad Joanna Connors was brave enough to write it. A narrative by turns wry and gut wrenching, "I Will Find You" brings a unique and important perspective to the genre I've come to think of as Survivor Lit. Working in the 1980s as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Connors was barely into her twenties when she was brutally raped by a stranger in what turned out to be an empty theatre where she had gone to do an interview. She immediately reported it, and her attacker, a black man even younger than she named David Francis, was caught (the next day, returning to the scene of his crime), arrested, tried and convicted. Eventually Connors returned to work, had two children with her husband, and got on with her life--or so she thought. Not wanting to be seen as a victim she kept insisting to everyone (including a parade of therapists) that she had "gotten over it" and was "fine." She hadn't; she wasn't. Joanna Connors spent decades in a state of near-paralyzing fear and secret shame before finally deciding she needed to know who her attacker was and what compelled him to do what he did. She turned her pursuit into a story for the newspaper and what she discovers as she tracks down Francis's surviving family members is a tangled, tragic intersection of societal racism, family dysfunction, child abuse, and drug addiction all combining to create a monster who, Connor realizes, was ultimately also a victim. Her final thoughts are haunting, heartbreaking.