Shout: The True Story of A Survivor Who Refused to be Silenced by Laurie Halse Anderson is a memoir written in verse published in 2019. Anderson wrote it as both a personal narrative and a call to action in the wake of the 2017 #MeToo movement, which supported survivors of sexual assault who came forward to share their stories publicly. Shout received widespread critical acclaim and was named Time’s Best Book of the Year 2019.

Laurie Halse Anderson is a New York Times best-selling author whose book Speak was a 1999 National Book Award finalist. The novel detailed a rape survivor named Melinda who reverts to silence after her assault, and it became a best seller. Speak is widely considered a classic of the young adult genre and has been adapted into a film and graphic novel of the same name. Anderson has used her platform to become an outspoken advocate against censorship. She pulled from these experiences in to write her memoir. Shout’s poetic and sometimes non-linear style is similar to the style Anderson used in Speak, utilizing shorter chapters, poems, and fragments to convey how trauma changes the way sexual assault survivors perceive the world around them.

Plot Summary

In Part 1, Anderson details her coming of age and her internal journey to understand how her sexual assault impacted her view of the world. Anderson is born to an alcoholic preacher father who was traumatized during his time serving in World War II and a stoic and passive mother. Her father’s job requires the family to move often, but Anderson grounds herself by reading books from the library and joining a swim team.

As she grows older and the family continues to move, her father’s alcoholism worsens. Anderson’s mother never teaches her daughter about puberty, and Anderson experiences confusion during her first period. In junior high, Anderson is sexually assaulted by a boy she thought was her friend. She keeps the rape a secret from everyone. Her assailant dies in an accident a few weeks afterwards, and Anderson’s suffering grows, encompassing shame, grief, and confusion. She drinks and takes drugs during ninth grade. Her family’s rollercoaster dynamic continues to worsen after her father is excommunicated and loses his job due his alcoholism.

With help from her teachers and coaches at school, Anderson eventually finds her footing again. She is accepted to a year-long study abroad program in Denmark. There she learns Danish and falls in love with translation. The author sees this time period as one in which she could grow without her parents, whose marriage was increasingly rocky. When she returns to the United States, she struggles with culture shock, eventually taking a job milking cows. She attends community college and later transfers to Georgetown. There, she documents the sexual harassment encounters she endures at the hands of male professors. Her refusal to give in to sexual coercion causes her to lose a scholarship to study abroad in Peru. She graduates with a degree in linguistics and marries her college sweetheart.

She takes a job as a reporter, which helps her hone her writing skills. Despite many attempts to write children’s books inspired by the births of her children, Anderson deals with rejection from publishers. She begins to have nightmares and one night hears a young girl’s disembodied voice crying and asking her to translate her experience to the page. Anderson listens to the voice. The book she writes based on that voice is entitled Speak. To Anderson’s surprise, the novel goes on to become a critically acclaimed National Book Award finalist.

Part 2 shifts to detailing Anderson’s life after Speak was published and what she learned from interacting with other survivors of sexual assault. As she grapples with the shock of her success, she begins meeting and speaking to young adults about the book at various events. She is overwhelmed by the amount of people—young and old, male and female—who confide in her that they, too, were sexually assaulted. When her book is banned in certain school districts and censored by school principals, she begins to advocate against censorship and banning books in schools.

Her experiences after Speak’s publication inform her views on sexual assault, sexuality, consent, education, and justice. Anderson points out the ways in which our understanding of sex, consent, and violence become skewed, noting the incorrect anatomy of a Ken Doll, the beauty of the word “yes,” and the often overlooked survivors of childhood sexual violence at the hands of the Catholic Church. Using her lived experience as a guide, Anderson writes a call to action that invokes the #MeToo movement and asks her reader to loudly support survivors everywhere.

Part 3 shifts into a shorter, more lyrical, non-linear narrative. Anderson meditates on her grandfather’s lessons about how to listen to trees. She observes that trees survive and stand tall because they help one another using a vast series of roots beneath the ground. Reminiscing about her childhood, when she was tall and gawky, she remembers stooping to make herself less noticeable and her father telling her never to stoop low. She ends the book promising survivors they can get help and that they, too, will one day stand tall in their own story.