Unbound

Tarana Burke founded the "me too" movement, and this memoir traces her own road to saying those words about herself. As a child in the Bronx, she was sexually assaulted and believed the fault was hers. Afraid that telling her family would break it apart, she kept silent.

The silence divided her. One part was a bright, curious girl, a third-generation Bronxite raised on Black literature and ideas of Black power. The other was a girl full of shame who saw herself as a rule breaker rather than as someone who had been harmed. Burke walled the second girl off behind pain and anger, and for a time that held.

When it stopped holding, she turned to organizing, to pursuing justice and to building community. Her work supporting Black and brown girls brought a hard realization: to help them, she had to face what happened to her and care for the frightened child she had hidden away. Two of those girls, Heaven and Diamond, are named as the ones who gave her the courage to do it.

This is a memoir of personal healing and of leadership, told in the first person by the woman at the center of one of the largest cultural movements in American history. It argues that empathy for others has to begin with empathy for oneself, and it reads as an earnest, hopeful account of recovery.