What Reached Him Without a Single Page
A friend texted me recently to tell me what she thought of the book. Her review was glowing, and then she mentioned that her husband didn't make it past page 15. He told her it was unbearable to see such a kind person that he had met briefly suffer at the hands of such a cruel person. He'd met me one time.
That text sent me back to a conversation from a couple of weeks before. At a memorial service after a death in our family, an extended family member came and found me and asked how I was doing. I started to tear up and told him that nobody had asked me that all day. I hadn't expected them to, because the day wasn't about me and I wasn't there to be asked about. He told me that he and his wife had thought about me often, and I could see it on his face. He said he was glad I wrote the book, and then he told me that he hadn't read it and didn't think he'd ever be able to. I told him that was okay, and that plenty of men close to us hadn't read it and wouldn't either.
Both of them were telling me a version of the same thing, and I've been turning it over since.
The men who read this book are the men who already know us
Almost every man who has read it, or who knows what's in it, is somebody close to Chad or to me. Most men aren't out looking for a memoir about a woman's sexual assault. It isn't subject matter they seek out, and I understood that before I ever published.
That leaves me with a limit I can't write my way around. The man whose behavior I'd most want this book to change was never going to pick it up, and the men who do pick it up are the ones who love us. Loving us is exactly what makes it unbearable for them to get through. The husband who stopped on page 15 had met me once, and that was enough. The family member who found me that day couldn't start at all.
One of Chad’s and my closest friends avoided it for months. He didn't want the intimate details of what happened to people he loves, and I understood that too. He finally started, and he's been reading it in pieces. He told me he was relieved to get past the assault section. He's still working through it, and he's glad he is. That's what it costs when you actually know us, because every name on the page belongs to somebody he'll see again and often.
None of these men are who I'm worried about. A man who has to put the book down because he can't bear what happened to a woman he met one time, I believe, is already treating the women in his life the way I'd want him to.
What I wanted from them, and what I got instead
I wrote this book so people would understand the magnitude of what happened, and there isn't a shortcut to that. The assault was one night, and most of the book is about the years that came after it, because that's where the damage lived and keeps living. It's in what happened to my marriage, and to my family, and to kids, who don’t even have the memories of it. Someone who stops at the beginning has read the worst of it without any of what followed, and what followed is the part I most need people to see.
So when the book closes on page 15, the understanding I was after doesn't happen, and I’ve realized it doesn’t sit easy with me. I appreciate his empathy, but I also want more than his empathy, because the change I'm after only comes once people understand what this actually does to a family.
“Change only comes once people understand what this actually does to a family.”
And then there's the man who never opened it and still crossed a room on a hard day to ask me how I was doing. I told Chad about it that night, and about how much it had meant to me, and he was thankful for it too. Then he said that when people put themselves out there and share a part of themselves, it almost gives other people permission to do the same.
That's the part I hadn't seen. I'd been measuring the book by whether people read it, when what happened that day was that a man who couldn't read a word of it put a piece of himself in front of me anyway, telling me that he and his wife had thought about me often and admitting the thing that would have been easier for him to leave unsaid. None of that is reading the book, and none of it happens if the book doesn't exist.
I meant it when I told him it was okay, and it also wasn't the entire truth. I do want him to read it. I want him to know what those years actually were, because that's the part that changes how a person moves through the world afterward. But I'm grateful he came and found me, and I believe him when he says he can't open it, and I'm starting to see that he understood the weight of this without needing every detail of it.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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