Text and the City: ‘Speak’ is a psychological sketch of the silent woman 

In “Text and the City,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books through a lens of modern femininity.

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

There is a particular kind of girl Stanford knows how to make. She is articulate at career fairs and composed in seminars. She has, through years of practice, become very good at what Melinda Sordino, the protagonist of Laurie Halsey Anderson’s “Speak,” calls the “performance of wellness.”

“I am getting better at smiling when people expect it,” Melinda remarked. 

If you’ve ever forced yourself to laugh with friends in the dining hall or have held yourself together through office hours while quietly falling apart, you already know her. You might already be her. 

One of the most challenged books in American schools, “Speak” dissects a specific kind of silence every woman is taught early on. It’s one that keeps her safe — or at least, less emotionally exposed. The novel follows Melinda through her freshman year of high school after she is raped at a summer party by a popular older student, Andy Evans. She called the police that night. Everyone blamed her for the party getting busted. 

By September, she is the school’s social pariah: mocked in hallways, abandoned by friends, invisible to teachers and unable to voice what happened to her. 

Anderson, who has spoken publicly about her own sexual assault experience, does not soften this. And 27 years after publication, “Speak” remains one of the most realistic books I have read about why survivors don’t come forward. They don’t lack courage; institutions around them have trained them not to speak. 

Instead of writing exclusively on the transgressions of rape and the need for perpetrators to face justice, Anderson’s feminist argument of “Speak” is that systems devised to protect survivors actually encourage their silence. Melinda’s school is not a den of obvious villainy. Her teachers are distracted, not cruel in their overlooking of Melinda’s silence. Her parents are exhausted, not malicious when they don’t strive to  understand her. But collectively, these familial and academic institutions teach a traumatized 14-year-old that her pain is not worth the disruption of naming it. 

“All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie,” Melinda thinks. “Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.” As a Stanford student, that passage hit me differently reading it  than it might have in high school. Here, we are surrounded by people who ostensibly want to hear what we have to say. Yet the structural pressure to exhibit competence, to never let fractures show, to file the right paperwork with the SHARE office and move on smoothly, is not so different from Merryweather High’s indifference to Melinda’s deterioration. 

Our protagonist doesn’t remain silent due to her weakness, but because speaking has already cost her everything. She has no reason to believe that speaking more will cost her any less. “IT happened,” Melinda thinks. “There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding.” “IT” is both the rape and the knowledge of it, a fact that lives in her body regardless of whether her mouth consents to acknowledging it. 

Art is Melinda’s salvation: specifically, a year-long assignment to draw a tree. Melinda’s art teacher, Mr. Freeman, is the one adult who nearly gets her to speak up. He tells his students, “This [assignment] is where you can find your soul if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you’ve never dared look at before.” While  other teachers drill outcomes and merit into Melinda’s mind, Mr. Freeman asks Melinda to go somewhere uncomfortable and make something true of it. 

What begins as a flat sketch of dead, winter-stripped stump slowly becomes something capable of surviving damage without being destroyed by it. Melinda’s final project (a three-dimensional sculpture) symbolizes her surviving her own traumatic experience. When Melinda finally confronts Andy Evans and speaks — actually speaks — it’s a staggering relief, an embodiment of that inner strength. 

However, I want to be clear about what I think this book asks of its readers, particularly its female ones. It is not asking us to admire Melinda’s resilience, which is the sentimental reading — and I think, the wrong one. Resilience is what we celebrate when we don’t want to change the conditions that require it. Instead, “Speak” beckons us to confront a silence we have accepted as normal, to notice whose comfort it protects and to ask ourselves whether the institutions we inhabit — Stanford included — have created the conditions under which a girl like Melinda could speak safely. 

“When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time,” Anderson says through Melinda. “Speak” matters at Stanford because it introduces a question we don’t ask enough: In a place that celebrates voice, who still feels like they can’t use theirs? And maybe more importantly, why?

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