I swapped a career supporting trauma survivors to become a novelist – now everything I do draws on what I learnt
As her critically acclaimed debut novel, ‘Disappearing Earth’, is released in the UK, Julia Phillips explores how her work in victim services informed her writing
‘No matter the workplace, we are living the dream as long as we are present for other people’
Recently, I had the good luck of leaving one dream job for another: I stepped away from a position at a not-for-profit organisation in order to be a novelist. My former workplace is in victim services, supporting trauma survivors – people who have been abused, assaulted and trafficked, who are living in violent households, who have lost loved ones to homicide – in their healing. The exchange of that workday routine, the real-world challenge of it, for a fiction-focused one has been fascinating. Disorienting. Turns out, a group therapy session and a debut authors’ meet-up have more in common than one might expect. In fact, everything I do now draws on what I learned working with survivors.
I had the chance to appreciate the education that work gave me when, just last week, my book tour took me back to my old office. While on staff, I had coordinated the organisation’s volunteer programme, which puts hundreds of people on call to hospitals around New York City. If someone comes to the emergency department after a sexual assault or incident of domestic violence, a programme volunteer helps them through their visit. These volunteers are at the hospital not as doctors or police officers or social workers, but as supportive strangers, members of the community, who ensure the person seeking care will be treated with respect. We call them volunteer advocates. To help the advocates decompress after their shifts, the office organises events: pizza parties, movie nights, a book club. The latter was what brought me back months after my resignation. The advocates had picked my debut novel, Disappearing Earth, for their latest club read, and I was coming by to join their discussion.
We sat in a circle in the conference room. The book is about the disappearance of two young sisters on a remote Russian peninsula, with every chapter centred on a different woman somehow connected to the sisters’ loss. The advocates flipped through their hardcovers while I folded my hands in my lap. One said, “The hospital scene in the third chapter reminded me of what we see on call. Were you thinking of that when you wrote it?” I nodded.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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The 25 best books by women
Show all 25
The 25 best books by women
1/25 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Austen remains one of history’s greatest masters in two tricky literary fields: the world of romance and the world of social satire. Pride and Prejudice, then, sees her at the peak of her powers. Through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet, her sharp-witted protagonist, we witness upper-class Regency England as both a dream and a farce. Not all is as it seems, and society betrays its holloweness when it deems that money should trump love.
2/25 Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Despite the fact that Hurston was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Their Eyes Were Watching God was largely rejected by her peers. It was during the 1970s and 1980s that her novel was essentially rediscovered, with many contemporary black feminists heralding the genius of her work. The novel focuses on Janie Crawford, a black woman who refuses to give in to bitterness or sorrow, as she navigates three marriages and a life marked by poverty. It’s a story bursting with passion and soulfulness.
3/25 The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
Jackson probed the darkest corners of the American psyche during the 1940s and 1950s, all thanks to her collections of ghost stories, including 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House, which was recently adapted into a Netflix series. With several novels and over 200 short stories for readers to get lost in, there are very few horror writers like her. That’s especially true when it comes to (arguably) her greatest work, 1948’s The Lottery, which traces a small town’s annual tradition to its sinister conclusion.
4/25 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
A Pulitzer Prize winner, To Kill a Mockingbird has carved its place in history. Its depiction of racial injustice in the American Deep South was startling frank for the 1960s, in a way that undeniably had a social impact at the time – it became an instant sensation and is now widely taught in American schools. Lee writes about the world’s cruelties with an honesty and compassion that still resonates, with the character of Atticus Finch becoming a enduring model of integrity for the legal profession.
5/25 Kindred - Octavia E Butler
Butler was a key figure in sci-fi history, expanding the boundaries of what the genre could achieve and what it could come to represent. First published in 1979, the book still feels as fresh as ever in its first-person account of a young black writer, Dana, who through strange circumstances, finds herself travelling between her own reality and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. It’s through this unusual theme that Butler can explore the lasting trauma of America’s history on African-Americans today.
6/25 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre feels, in many ways, thoroughly modern today. Although originally published under the pen name “Currer Bell”, it feels likes a dive into the mind of Brontë herself. The story is told through a first-person narrative that feels so psychologically intimate, it’s as if she’s sharing the secrets of her own world with us. We follow Jane through her school years, all the way to her later employment by Mr Rochester, a tortured soul who she falls madly in love with, with many aspects of her journey reflecting elements of Brontë’s own life.
7/25 Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie, who was born in Nigeria, is considered one of the most original literary voices of her generation. You can see why this is when reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which depicts the brutality of the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, as seen through four different perspectives: twin daughters of a wealthy businessman, a British citizen, a professor, and a houseboy. It’s history via an achingly human lens.
8/25 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Smith remains a modern titan of the British literary scene, thanks partially to White Teeth, which is considered one of the most sensational fiction debuts of all time, becoming an immediate bestseller and sweeping up multiple awards. It’s a tale of two men – Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and Englishman Archie Jones – who become friends after being stationed together during WWII. Their return to London sees the book examine British post-war attitudes to those from formerly colonised countries, although Smith ensures the subject is approached with both heart and a sense of humour.
9/25 The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector
Lispector was a literary innovator. The Hour of the Star, published posthumously in 1977, invents a narrator named Rodrigo SM, who in turns tells the story of Macabéa, a poor young woman who hails from Alagoas, where Lispector’s family first settled when they immigrated to Brazil. However, the way Rodrigo perceives Macabéa, and reckons with her story, itself creates a dialogue between the two characters, calling into question notions of identity and authorship.
10/25 Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
One of literature’s sharpest minds and inspiration to the feminist movement in the 1970s, Woolf not only helped pioneer the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, but utilised it to speak openly about sexuality, mental illness, and gender roles. The novel largely follows the inner thoughts of two characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, one a high-society woman in post-WWI England and the other a veteran suffering from shell shock.
11/25 A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories – Flannery O’Connor
O’Connor wrote hard stories for a hard world. Her unsentimental, sardonic use of the Southern Gothic style helped weave her own take on the parable, in which the morally weak often face violent, painful punishment for their misdeeds. That said, the door is always open for transformation and spiritual awakening by the story’s conclusion, with her work frequently confronting ideas of morality and ethics through the lens of her own Catholic faith.
12/25 Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
At times, it seems less like Persepolis is a story. Satrapi’s graphic novel, published in two volumes in 2000 and 2004, feels more like an invitation, as she takes our hand and leads us through her childhood and early adult years, so that we can see through the eyes of a curious, funny, smart young girl who must face the personal repercussions of war and religious extremism in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution. It’s the political seen through the personal, but it’s always Satrapi’s own spirit that shines the brightest.
13/25 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Many have now come to consider Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first pure work of science-fiction, with a central narrative driven a character’s exploration of a world beyond what we already know. Not only is it significant for its later influence on culture, but Shelley’s work, initially published anonymously, is astonishing in both its emotional vitality and its philosophical implications. It’s a work where we both feel the anguish of the misunderstood, while also reckoning with the concept of man’s unbridled power.
14/25 Beloved – Toni Morrison
Beloved takes its inspiration from the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and fled to Ohio, a free state. However, the story itself focuses on a protagonist named Sethe, a former slave, whose home is haunted by a malevolent presence that she believes is her eldest daughter. It’s through this vivid sense of magical realism that Morrison can confront the unfathomable trauma that slavery has inflicted on the African-American collective memory.
15/25 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Although the book has received increased attention thanks to Hulu’s critically acclaimed TV adaptation, it’s all thanks to the fierceness of Atwood’s critical analysis of gender politics. Her 1985 book, which imagines a near-future New England controlled by a totalitarian state, in which women are completely subjugated to men, has only become increasingly relevant – and prescient. Her work provides a continued reminder that it doesn’t take much for our world to slip into complete dystopia.
16/25 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans, amongst other concerns, feared that her work, Middlemarch, would be dismissed entirely due to the notion that women’s writing was strictly light and romantic. And so, instead, it was published in eight instalments across 1871 and 1872 under the name George Eliot. The book is far from light; set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch, it follows a vast, sweeping narrative that encompasses subjects of religion, idealism, and political reform.
17/25 Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng
Ng writes about American suburbia with an astounding clarity, perhaps partially because she considers the act of writing about one’s hometown as a little like “writing about a relative”, with an attachment that perceives both their greatest attributes and their flaws. Little Fires Everywhere is her second novel to take place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she grew up, and focuses on a new arrival to the town, who sense of mystery disrupts its residents’s obsession with structure and rules.
18/25 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Famous for its popularity with teenage girls, Plath’s work speaks to clearly to an adolescent precisely because it makes no attempt to sugar-coat the prospect of the entrance into adulthood. The book’s protagonist, Esther, a young woman attempting to establish herself in New York, feels more like a front for Plath to discuss her own experiences of struggling with mental health, especially in the context of the 1950s, when women’s concerns were so rarely paid attention to. There is an honesty to Esther’s frustration that has been a comfort to many.
19/25 My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend is only one part of Ferrante’s four-book series, known as the Neapolitan Novels. As the first chapter, it is, de facto, the most well known of the series, but it’s also an invitation to such raw intimacy that readers will be unable to resist delving into the rest. Ferrante serves as a pseudonym, allowing the books to illuminate with candor the friendship between two women, born in Naples in 1944, who try to find peace in a world of violence and misogyny.
20/25 The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton captures with vigour both the opulence and the suffocating claustrophobia of New York’s Gilded Age, as two future newlyweds – in every other way society’s perfect vision of man and woman – find their union disrupted by the arrival of a cousin shrouded in scandal. The Age of Innocence is a wistful, romantic novel that still succeeds in treating society’s hypocrisy with an acute sense of disdain.
21/25 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Marking a rare mastery of the epistolary novel, The Color Purple focuses on the experiences of black women living in the US South during the 1930s. Although it deals with themes of abuse and violence, the honesty in Walker’s voice is disarming in a way that opens us up to her protagonist’s journey towards self-realisation and personal freedom. It’s no wonder that the book’s continued relevance saw it both adapted into 1985 film, directed by Steven Spielberg, and a Broadway musical.
22/25 Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca remains one the finest examples of Gothic literature, despite the fact that du Maurier wasn’t writing within the confines of some drafty Victorian castle; rather, she was examining the world of spirits during the interwar period. In its story of a woman whose whirlwind courtship with a widower turns sour when she becomes haunted by the lingering presence of her husband’s first wife, Rebecca is a book filled with suppressed desires, loss, and a looming sense of threat.
23/25 The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
As Roy’s debut novel, it’s an extraordinary first outing. Roy contrasts the innocence of childhood, as seen in the book’s protagonists, fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, with the rising political turmoil in Kerala during 1969. It also features a non-sequential approach to narrative, with the novel intricately weaving between the twins’s reunion in 1993 and the lengthy flashback and sidetracks, all painted with a massive sense of scope and imagination.
24/25 Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
We may know every twist and turn of Christie’s best works by now, but there’s still a frisson to how intricately and confidently she pulls the rug from underneath readers. Murder on the Orient Express still feels like her most enthralling work, as famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finds himself in the midst of a murder scene, after his train is blocked by the heavy snowfall and a passenger is found dead, making the rest of those on board all instant suspects.
25/25 The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
The oldest book on this list, this classic of Japanese literature was written by Shikibu, a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, in the early 11th century. Although the original manuscript no longer exists, what’s been passed down to us now was translated initially into modern Japanese, with English translations being published at a later time. An account of the life Hikaru Genji, the son of the emperor, it’s a masterful work of psychological portraiture, which offers a rare glimpse into the cultural customs of post-classical Japan.
1/25 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Austen remains one of history’s greatest masters in two tricky literary fields: the world of romance and the world of social satire. Pride and Prejudice, then, sees her at the peak of her powers. Through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet, her sharp-witted protagonist, we witness upper-class Regency England as both a dream and a farce. Not all is as it seems, and society betrays its holloweness when it deems that money should trump love.
2/25 Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Despite the fact that Hurston was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Their Eyes Were Watching God was largely rejected by her peers. It was during the 1970s and 1980s that her novel was essentially rediscovered, with many contemporary black feminists heralding the genius of her work. The novel focuses on Janie Crawford, a black woman who refuses to give in to bitterness or sorrow, as she navigates three marriages and a life marked by poverty. It’s a story bursting with passion and soulfulness.
3/25 The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
Jackson probed the darkest corners of the American psyche during the 1940s and 1950s, all thanks to her collections of ghost stories, including 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House, which was recently adapted into a Netflix series. With several novels and over 200 short stories for readers to get lost in, there are very few horror writers like her. That’s especially true when it comes to (arguably) her greatest work, 1948’s The Lottery, which traces a small town’s annual tradition to its sinister conclusion.
4/25 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
A Pulitzer Prize winner, To Kill a Mockingbird has carved its place in history. Its depiction of racial injustice in the American Deep South was startling frank for the 1960s, in a way that undeniably had a social impact at the time – it became an instant sensation and is now widely taught in American schools. Lee writes about the world’s cruelties with an honesty and compassion that still resonates, with the character of Atticus Finch becoming a enduring model of integrity for the legal profession.
5/25 Kindred - Octavia E Butler
Butler was a key figure in sci-fi history, expanding the boundaries of what the genre could achieve and what it could come to represent. First published in 1979, the book still feels as fresh as ever in its first-person account of a young black writer, Dana, who through strange circumstances, finds herself travelling between her own reality and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. It’s through this unusual theme that Butler can explore the lasting trauma of America’s history on African-Americans today.
6/25 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre feels, in many ways, thoroughly modern today. Although originally published under the pen name “Currer Bell”, it feels likes a dive into the mind of Brontë herself. The story is told through a first-person narrative that feels so psychologically intimate, it’s as if she’s sharing the secrets of her own world with us. We follow Jane through her school years, all the way to her later employment by Mr Rochester, a tortured soul who she falls madly in love with, with many aspects of her journey reflecting elements of Brontë’s own life.
7/25 Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie, who was born in Nigeria, is considered one of the most original literary voices of her generation. You can see why this is when reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which depicts the brutality of the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, as seen through four different perspectives: twin daughters of a wealthy businessman, a British citizen, a professor, and a houseboy. It’s history via an achingly human lens.
8/25 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Smith remains a modern titan of the British literary scene, thanks partially to White Teeth, which is considered one of the most sensational fiction debuts of all time, becoming an immediate bestseller and sweeping up multiple awards. It’s a tale of two men – Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and Englishman Archie Jones – who become friends after being stationed together during WWII. Their return to London sees the book examine British post-war attitudes to those from formerly colonised countries, although Smith ensures the subject is approached with both heart and a sense of humour.
9/25 The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector
Lispector was a literary innovator. The Hour of the Star, published posthumously in 1977, invents a narrator named Rodrigo SM, who in turns tells the story of Macabéa, a poor young woman who hails from Alagoas, where Lispector’s family first settled when they immigrated to Brazil. However, the way Rodrigo perceives Macabéa, and reckons with her story, itself creates a dialogue between the two characters, calling into question notions of identity and authorship.
10/25 Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
One of literature’s sharpest minds and inspiration to the feminist movement in the 1970s, Woolf not only helped pioneer the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, but utilised it to speak openly about sexuality, mental illness, and gender roles. The novel largely follows the inner thoughts of two characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, one a high-society woman in post-WWI England and the other a veteran suffering from shell shock.
11/25 A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories – Flannery O’Connor
O’Connor wrote hard stories for a hard world. Her unsentimental, sardonic use of the Southern Gothic style helped weave her own take on the parable, in which the morally weak often face violent, painful punishment for their misdeeds. That said, the door is always open for transformation and spiritual awakening by the story’s conclusion, with her work frequently confronting ideas of morality and ethics through the lens of her own Catholic faith.
12/25 Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
At times, it seems less like Persepolis is a story. Satrapi’s graphic novel, published in two volumes in 2000 and 2004, feels more like an invitation, as she takes our hand and leads us through her childhood and early adult years, so that we can see through the eyes of a curious, funny, smart young girl who must face the personal repercussions of war and religious extremism in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution. It’s the political seen through the personal, but it’s always Satrapi’s own spirit that shines the brightest.
13/25 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Many have now come to consider Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first pure work of science-fiction, with a central narrative driven a character’s exploration of a world beyond what we already know. Not only is it significant for its later influence on culture, but Shelley’s work, initially published anonymously, is astonishing in both its emotional vitality and its philosophical implications. It’s a work where we both feel the anguish of the misunderstood, while also reckoning with the concept of man’s unbridled power.
14/25 Beloved – Toni Morrison
Beloved takes its inspiration from the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and fled to Ohio, a free state. However, the story itself focuses on a protagonist named Sethe, a former slave, whose home is haunted by a malevolent presence that she believes is her eldest daughter. It’s through this vivid sense of magical realism that Morrison can confront the unfathomable trauma that slavery has inflicted on the African-American collective memory.
15/25 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Although the book has received increased attention thanks to Hulu’s critically acclaimed TV adaptation, it’s all thanks to the fierceness of Atwood’s critical analysis of gender politics. Her 1985 book, which imagines a near-future New England controlled by a totalitarian state, in which women are completely subjugated to men, has only become increasingly relevant – and prescient. Her work provides a continued reminder that it doesn’t take much for our world to slip into complete dystopia.
16/25 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans, amongst other concerns, feared that her work, Middlemarch, would be dismissed entirely due to the notion that women’s writing was strictly light and romantic. And so, instead, it was published in eight instalments across 1871 and 1872 under the name George Eliot. The book is far from light; set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch, it follows a vast, sweeping narrative that encompasses subjects of religion, idealism, and political reform.
17/25 Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng
Ng writes about American suburbia with an astounding clarity, perhaps partially because she considers the act of writing about one’s hometown as a little like “writing about a relative”, with an attachment that perceives both their greatest attributes and their flaws. Little Fires Everywhere is her second novel to take place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she grew up, and focuses on a new arrival to the town, who sense of mystery disrupts its residents’s obsession with structure and rules.
18/25 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Famous for its popularity with teenage girls, Plath’s work speaks to clearly to an adolescent precisely because it makes no attempt to sugar-coat the prospect of the entrance into adulthood. The book’s protagonist, Esther, a young woman attempting to establish herself in New York, feels more like a front for Plath to discuss her own experiences of struggling with mental health, especially in the context of the 1950s, when women’s concerns were so rarely paid attention to. There is an honesty to Esther’s frustration that has been a comfort to many.
19/25 My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend is only one part of Ferrante’s four-book series, known as the Neapolitan Novels. As the first chapter, it is, de facto, the most well known of the series, but it’s also an invitation to such raw intimacy that readers will be unable to resist delving into the rest. Ferrante serves as a pseudonym, allowing the books to illuminate with candor the friendship between two women, born in Naples in 1944, who try to find peace in a world of violence and misogyny.
20/25 The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton captures with vigour both the opulence and the suffocating claustrophobia of New York’s Gilded Age, as two future newlyweds – in every other way society’s perfect vision of man and woman – find their union disrupted by the arrival of a cousin shrouded in scandal. The Age of Innocence is a wistful, romantic novel that still succeeds in treating society’s hypocrisy with an acute sense of disdain.
21/25 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Marking a rare mastery of the epistolary novel, The Color Purple focuses on the experiences of black women living in the US South during the 1930s. Although it deals with themes of abuse and violence, the honesty in Walker’s voice is disarming in a way that opens us up to her protagonist’s journey towards self-realisation and personal freedom. It’s no wonder that the book’s continued relevance saw it both adapted into 1985 film, directed by Steven Spielberg, and a Broadway musical.
22/25 Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca remains one the finest examples of Gothic literature, despite the fact that du Maurier wasn’t writing within the confines of some drafty Victorian castle; rather, she was examining the world of spirits during the interwar period. In its story of a woman whose whirlwind courtship with a widower turns sour when she becomes haunted by the lingering presence of her husband’s first wife, Rebecca is a book filled with suppressed desires, loss, and a looming sense of threat.
23/25 The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
As Roy’s debut novel, it’s an extraordinary first outing. Roy contrasts the innocence of childhood, as seen in the book’s protagonists, fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, with the rising political turmoil in Kerala during 1969. It also features a non-sequential approach to narrative, with the novel intricately weaving between the twins’s reunion in 1993 and the lengthy flashback and sidetracks, all painted with a massive sense of scope and imagination.
24/25 Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
We may know every twist and turn of Christie’s best works by now, but there’s still a frisson to how intricately and confidently she pulls the rug from underneath readers. Murder on the Orient Express still feels like her most enthralling work, as famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finds himself in the midst of a murder scene, after his train is blocked by the heavy snowfall and a passenger is found dead, making the rest of those on board all instant suspects.
25/25 The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
The oldest book on this list, this classic of Japanese literature was written by Shikibu, a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, in the early 11th century. Although the original manuscript no longer exists, what’s been passed down to us now was translated initially into modern Japanese, with English translations being published at a later time. An account of the life Hikaru Genji, the son of the emperor, it’s a masterful work of psychological portraiture, which offers a rare glimpse into the cultural customs of post-classical Japan.
“And the characters – you know, it’s like we talk about in training,” said another. “The way trauma affects not only the survivor but also the co-survivors.” This was the job’s unforgettable vocabulary: survivor meaning the person who experienced the violence, co-survivor meaning their friends and family. Every one of those people is hurting in a different way.
Another advocate turned her book over. “The relationship in chapter five made me think about the cycle of abuse.” Everyone murmured. They all knew the pattern of abusive behaviour – the building tension, the outburst, the honeymoon period afterwards, then the tension starting up again – because they discussed it with domestic violence survivors during every hospital visit.
“It makes sense that so much feels familiar,” I said. “I wrote this about the work we do. It’s all about you.”
The role of a volunteer advocate is both limited and mighty. When I went through my own training in 2010, it took me a while to grasp what purpose advocates serve.
Through that first training, my volunteer coordinator – my future coworker – repeated the tenets of advocacy. Arrive promptly at the hospital, listen to the survivor, and respond to their concerns and needs. Help restore their sense of control after they’ve had control taken away from them by violence. Offer information when they seek it, because you are there to give structure and sense to their hospital visit. You are there to make a terrible time as easy as possible. And never pass judgment, because no part of this person’s life is for you to decide.
At first I kept wondering: we show up in a stranger’s hospital room right after they’ve been assaulted and do... what? We listen? We don’t treat them medically or gather evidence – we’re just hanging around? Isn’t that an intrusion? Isn’t that awful? I was terrified of pushing my way into someone else’s pain. I didn’t understand.
Yes, as an advocate, you show up and listen. You respond to what the survivor says and support them as they make their own choices. That’s all, basically. That’s not much. And yet I tell you that these four actions are rare joys to experience, whether at the emergency department or in our daily lives.
When was the last time someone listened to you? Really listened. Hung on your every word. When did you last trust that the person you were talking to had no expectations, no judgments, no matter what you said? What was the last conversation in which you felt heard and kept safe? Where the person with whom you were speaking didn’t interrupt, start talking about themselves, tell you to calm down, or dismiss your fears?
Maybe you experience such moments in a therapist’s office or during particularly intimate conversations with a friend. Whenever it happens, it’s exceptional, I’m sure. Yet advocates make this profound kind of connection their routine.
Show up. Listen. Respond to concerns. Be supportive. As simple as these things sound, they are immensely powerful. During advocate training, I started to value how good they feel.
Imagine, if you will, being in the hospital after you’ve been hurt. You might be alone there. You’re in pain. You’re scared. Then someone comes in who listens to you. While hospital staff come in and out of your room through the visit, this person stays, answers your questions about what to expect, and provides some clarity to the chaos. They don’t judge you and they don’t tell you what to do. Don’t you remember, from those times you’ve been listened to, how meaningful that support is? Can you imagine, after someone hurts you, how much hope being with a kind stranger can give?
Over years of being a volunteer advocate, I met people who, moments after facing horrific violence, laughed and wept and shared secrets. I listened to them all. Someone who’d been trafficked out of high school. Someone with a brain injury from a spouse who kept hitting them in the head. Someone who’d been kept in a basement by their abuser for months. Survivors who were terrified of losing their kids, their homes, their jobs, their visa status, their lives.
When they asked questions, I replied, to the best of my ability. We might chat about STI prophylaxis and emergency contraception. I could provide phone numbers for emergency housing, legal advocacy, and trauma therapy. But some questions have no easy answers. “Why did this happen to me?” people say. “How can I keep it from happening again? Am I going to be all right after this? Am I going to be OK?”
These are the things we all ask ourselves after experiencing or witnessing pain. The questions resonate inside when we are harmed, when we lose a loved one, when we read the news. Why? How can we stop this from happening again? Hearing them from others and in myself is what drove me to start writing this book; isn’t there some way to stay safe?
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Simon & Schuster)
The truth is, violence is indiscriminate. Damage and destruction can come to any of us at any time. We can be hurt at the hands of a stranger or a partner, in our homes or out on the streets. As an advocate, I watched people of every race, gender, sexuality, class, and faith show up at the emergency department.
After a while I came to accept that there is no sure way of defending ourselves. Danger is constant. But after hurt, we do have the capacity to heal. “Am I going to be OK?” someone would ask me at the hospital. Part of advocacy is not making promises we can’t keep, so it wasn’t appropriate for me to tell them yes, you’ll be fine, everything will work out, things are going to improve now. That might not be true. How, then, to respond? I’d say, “You’re alive. You made it through this. You’re here. I’m so glad you survived”.
These are the lessons I wrote into my book, which is set in a place far away from any New York City hospital room; violence touches us all. We can’t stop or undo it. It makes of us survivors and co-survivors as it ripples through our families, communities, and countries.
And yet we keep going. We’re alive. What a gift. We show up for each other, hear each other out, and offer our support. We care for each other. We listen. I can’t make any promises about what the future holds, but I do believe that giving that kind of support is how, individually and societally, we recover.
That’s the thesis of the novel: through connection, we help each other heal. It’s why every chapter in the book introduces a different character. The structure of the book replicates what working in victim services taught me. Just as pain can be caused by collision with another person, hope can come through connection to a person, too.
As I move from job to job, I take along this ethos of advocacy. It’s clear when you’re at the hospital how powerful compassionate presence is, but it’s just as apparent when you’re eating pizza with fellow volunteers at a nonprofit or when you’re meeting readers at a bookstore event. I feel it when I sit alone to write – how important it is to approach a situation with an open mind, listen attentively to what the world is saying, and speak the truth. And I certainly felt its power from the advocates at the book club that night. In the midst of their busy lives, their other commitments, they chose to show up for me, for each other, and for the sake of connection to their community.
That’s all. That’s everything. It’s what advocacy taught me and what I hope my writing conveys. Someone may hurt us, but community can heal us. When we come together, we heal ourselves.
After the book tour ends, I don’t know what my next job will be. But no matter the workplace, we are living the dream as long as we are present for other people. When we listen to our friends, our neighbours, a stranger, and act to help them in whatever ways they need and we can, then we create hope and purpose in those spaces in our lives that had been filled by pain. That’s how we survive. I’ll never forget this lesson now – I’m so grateful to have learned it. We make it through this life, this painful, precious life, together.
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