Where I Stopped [Hardcover]

Martha Ramsey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 3, 1996

A woman shares her devastating experience with rape at age thirteen, chronicling such painful events as her family's reactions, her ordeal in an open courtroom, and her efforts to understand her abuser's act.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Poet Ramsey (Blood Stories) was raped at the age of 13 by a stranger in the woods near her home. Here she details her recent efforts to trace the effects of this traumatic event on her subsequent development. The rape occurred, she explains, just when she began to be conscious of her sexual identity and to want to be desired by men. Consequently, it seemed to present her with a horrific warning. Ramsey's account of her refusal, even as a teenager, to blame herself for what happened is inspiring, as is her belief-which undergirds this book-that confronting and working through painful episodes helps banish their effects. Her unflinching scrutiny of the ways in which being raped affected her life, and her prose itself-elegant, clear and sharply insightful-make this memoir well worth reading for fans of personal narrative.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

At 13, Ramsey was independent, tough, and very smart. Almost too smart. After being raped, she knew exactly what to do and conducted herself throughout the investigation and trial with considerable aplomb. But the adults in her life, especially her parents, failed to provide any emotional or spiritual comfort, thus condemning her to the dark, lonely silence of her stoicism. This book, which gleams as brightly as a searchlight against the night sky, is Ramsey's unsparing account of coming to terms with rape, a rape that savaged her innocence, warped her sexuality, and estranged her from family, friends, true-hearted lovers, and even herself. Ramsey is a poet, and her eye and ear for details and emotional nuance are extraordinary, infusing this exacting tale with a cathartic power. She traces every stage of her emotional life and chronicles her predictably disastrous relationships with men and her quest to be somehow "unraped." She did finally meet a compassionate man, but it was the writing of this magnificently honest book, 27 years after the fact, that healed the wounds of rape, and Ramsey's story, so courageously and beautifully told, will teach and heal others. Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 325 pages
• Publisher: G.P. Putnam & Sons Adult; 1ST edition (January 3, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399141073
• ISBN-13: 978-0399141072
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #671,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Martha Ramsey was born in 1954 in Flemington, New Jersey, a farming community about 65 miles southwest of New York City. She had unusually creative, bohemian-minded, arts-oriented parents; her father was the pioneering jazz historian Frederic Ramsey, Jr. As a child she was precociously intelligent, socially clueless, and a bookworm. She attended high school at Solebury School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The summer before tenth grade, in 1968, at age 13, while she was out on her own on a bike ride on back roads, she was attacked and raped by a 28-year-old man, a stranger to her. (Within his family and immediate friends, he was suspected of having molested other girls, but none of his other victims' families had come forward.)

After the rape Martha endured a confrontation with the rapist, at the police barracks, and giving testimony at the trial that resulted in his conviction and a sentence of 15 years. Five years later, on the same date as his rape of Martha, almost immediately after being paroled, the perpetrator brutally abused and murdered a 16-year-old girl in the same community; he was sentenced to life in prison for that crime.

Where I Stopped, written when Ramsey was in her thirties, tells this story in detail and follows her attempts to understand what had happened to her and how it affected her over the years as she grew into adulthood, pursued her calling as a poet, and married, and her eventual decision to go back to the place where she grew up, speak with people who remembered the crime and who participated in the trial, unearth the police and trial records, and come to terms with what she remembered.

A literary memoir first published to high critical acclaim in 1995, Where I Stopped was ahead of its time, and was the first book-length autobiography focusing on rape during adolescence. It is a classic account of sexual trauma and recovery.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why I Read: RAPED AT THIRTEEN, November 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Where I Stopped: Remembering a Childhood Rape (Paperback)

A sensitive subject to be sure, I was compelled by what an intensely personal trauma this must have been and by the fact that I know someone who had this very experience at the age of fourteen. What stands out in my mind about the impact of the book is that it made time stand still for me while I read of Ms. Ramsey's experience and left an indelible image of how life experiences can alter us psychologically when we least expect it and in profoundly troubling ways. The most troubling of all is the nature of the criminal mind and how our society leaves us at all times in vulnerable positions because criminals do reside among us, prey at their convenience, and do great damage. That a thirteen year old went through a hell of sorts provides a sobering glimpse at the nasty underbelly of the social morass.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars REMARKABLE, HONEST AND BEAUTIFUL, February 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Where I Stopped: Remembering a Childhood Rape (Paperback)

Martha Ramsey's account of her rape at the age of thirteen is a remarkably honest and beautifully written memoir of a very bright child caught up in an incomprehensible crime at the tender age when she was just becoming aware of her own body and sexuality. Her adolescent self-consciousness about the sexual nature of the crime, and her parents' and siblings' reactions to the rape, and the perceived lack of support she received from them, were something she had to reconcile later in life, when she began to suspect that she may never have adequately coped with what had happened to her. This is her story of returning to her past, and trying to understand how being raped at the age of thirteen by a stranger in the woods, may have shaped some of the decisions she made, both in her academic life and in her personal life.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth reading, April 11, 2004

By 

J. Jacobs - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Where I Stopped: Remembering a Childhood Rape (Paperback)

Honest, sensitive and moving, this is an important book well worth reading.