 Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon everybody. Welcome. My name is John Solomon. I am the director of the Longmont Public Library and we're very happy to have you all here this afternoon. This is a great partnership library at the museum series that we do and it makes a lot of sense for libraries and museums to do this kind of programming for you all. So I hope you enjoy this. A few introductions and then I'll turn it over for while you are why you are all here, which is not to listen to me. So I want to thank our sponsors, Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Stewart Family Foundation, museum donors and our museum members and if any members are here, welcome and thank you very much. Media sponsors, KGNU Community Radio and the Longmont Leader. So thank you, all of you. So let me introduce these two on the stage beside me. This is Jana Kopp, has been a librarian at the Longmont Public Library since 2010. She manages parts of our collections and works on organizing programs like this one as well as answering questions at our reference desk. She also reads and discusses books for our library podcast, Bookchatter. Jana holds a BA in English literature from the University of Washington, a master of arts in liberal arts from St. John's College and a master of science in library science from Emporia State University. Thank you, Jana. And Erica Krauss, sitting next to Jana. Erica Krauss is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Most recently, Tell Me Everything, the story of a private investigation published by Flatiron Books in March 2022. Tell Me Everything was a book of the month club pick, a New York Times editor's choice pick, and a People Magazine people pick. It has also been optioned for TV adaptation by Playground Entertainment. In addition to Tell Me Everything, Erica was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for her novel Contenders and won the Patterson Fiction Award for her short story collection, Come Up and See Me Sometime, which was also a New York Times notable book of the year and translated into six languages. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other publications far too many to list out here. Erica went to middle school and high school in Japan, earned her BA from Grinnell College in Iowa. She earned her MA in English literature and creative writing from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also taught creative writing classes. She teaches and mentors for the Lighthouse Book Project at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver and is a winner of the Lighthouse Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence. Please join me in welcoming Erica Kraus. Well thank you, John, for that lovely introduction and we're very pleased to have John as our new library director. So I'm glad that he was able to come and meet all of you. So I want to give a heartfelt thank you to Erica for joining us today. And I want to preface our interview with the caveat that Erica's book, which we will be discussing, does address sexual assault and child abuse. So if you feel uncomfortable at any time, please feel free to excuse yourself if you need a moment and the doors are open. So Erica, so I noticed that your memoir is really about storytelling. I guess that's probably a quality of most memoirs, but there's different storylines happening in this memoir, which makes it especially about storytelling. Both your own story and the stories others told you as a private investigator while working on a sexual assault case brought under Title IX against the University of Colorado at Boulder. So I'd like to set the stage for a discussion by asking you to read from the beginning of your book, which it's a really interesting beginning. It's pretty captivating, so we'll see what you all think. Okay, I'll only read a little bit. First I want to thank everybody for coming today to this really atmospherically dark and moody room on a beautiful day outside. And thank you to the Longmont Library for organizing and hosting me at this event. And also to this amazing museum, which I kind of want to live here. So you're going to be seeing a lot of me, I guess, as I move in. And also thank you to Janna for doing the very, I don't know if you guys have ever interviewed, but it is really hard. And she's really done a lot of work to do this. So thank you. And also to John, thank you for introducing us. So I'm going to read from the very beginning, just the first paragraph or so, the very beginning of the first chapter and it's entitled, The Face. I became a private investigator because of my face. It's an ordinary-looking face. But if I ask, how are you? Sometimes people start crying. I'm getting a divorce, they say. He ended our marriage by text. Or I was just diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease. Or a man grips a packet of peas in the frozen food aisle and asks, how do you cook these? My wife died last month. Or an immaculately dressed woman suddenly tells me, I hate my job so much I want to kill myself. I've been saving up ambience. And then it goes on. Yeah, so if you haven't picked up the book yet, it's just a captivating read. So there are copies that will be for sale in the lobby afterwards. We'll be having the book signing. So to dive right in, so you write about your face and we get to see your face in person. It's ordinary. And you say that having this kind of face, a face that gets people to tell you their secrets means that you were the perfect person to work as a private investigator, even though you had no education or background in that profession. And that's how you were offered the job by the attorney at the Boulder bookstore that you referred to as Grayson. And Grayson just hired you on the spot after this chance encounter to help him investigate his lawsuits. And I guess he ended up telling you some of his secrets. So he got to see her in action, right? And one question that we wondered about some of the other librarians and I was looking back, do you agree with Grayson's decision to recruit someone with no PI experience? It does seem like a kind of risky move. Right. And the PI job, I recently had the extreme pleasure of having lunch with 11 PIs. That never happened. I'm going to say about it called 11 PIs walk into a bar. And I was so curious about all these PIs. There's a large firm in Denver that they have these monthly meetings and they invited me to one. And I asked them, how did you come into this job? And everybody kind of, every PI there was like, oh, it's totally random. I talked to someone to talk to someone or I answered a Craigslist ad or I fell into it one way or the other. So I think there definitely are experienced PIs. However, I don't think my experience was actually that unusual now that I talked to the other 11. Or maybe we were all just anomalies. But it's a very strange job. You can't get an education for it. You can't go to school to be a PI. That doesn't exist. So people really just recruit you for this job based on the ability to get answers, really. So there'll be literature PhDs who are PIs. Right. Or people who someone found on the street corner and said, go do this thing for me and they did it. And then they found out they have the moral flexibility that you need to be a PI. So it's a random. Yeah, I had no idea. Well, I mean, I guess I thought maybe they'd have a background in the law or criminal investigation or something like that. Yeah, I think definitely some do. But I think these days they're more likely to be academics than they are to be in criminal justice. Okay. So that kind of segues into my next question, which we talk about emotional labor at different kind of jobs that we do and how we want to keep that out. And I felt a lot of emotional labor going into the way that you operated as a PI. Do you feel, is that just part of the work in general? And, you know, looking back on it, do you feel that you were adequately compensated? I was way more compensated than I thought it would be because at that time I was working as a temp. So I was making, I think I was making $12 an hour, you know. And sometimes I get it up to like $12.50, you know. And here this lawyer comes along. Oh, by the way, can everyone hear me okay? And can you hear Janna too? Okay. So, you know, he offers me five times, about five times what I was making, right? For, you know, just showing up and getting people to talk to me. And I was like, well, that is a great job. And then, so that part is great. But there is emotional labor, you're right. It's not just dealing with these very difficult subjects because, you know, I was doing PI work for a lawyer and when people go to see a lawyer, it's usually the worst time in their life, you know. Like lawyers and ER doctors, those are the worst times in your life, right? So you're dealing with someone's tragedy and also they're seeking justice in some way, right? And justice is kind of hard to come by. So that was hard. That was a hard part of the job. And especially when we started working on this huge David and Goliath case that, you know, it was the first ever Title IX sexual assault case in history. So the lawyer had no idea how to go, you know, I mean, he did an amazing job. But like going in, there was no playbook for this. And did I use the football reference? Well, is that how you say it? And so there's no real way to know how to proceed legally. And so he's making up on the spot. I had never done this job before. I'm making it up on the spot. There was a lot of scrambling while trying to look like we knew exactly what we were doing. So it was a little harder than it probably looked. Yeah. So and, you know, speaking of being a PI, I thought you drew an interesting parallel when you started talking about how being a PI is kind of like being a sex worker. You write that one exchanges secrets for money and the other exchanges money for secrets. And sections of your book are about a madam that you called Daisy in her role in the case. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about the intersectionality of sex work and private investigation or why you chose to include Daisy so prominently in the story. Right. So this case in particular, there was quite a lot of overlap between sex work and the investigation because Daisy, as I called her, she came forward to say, you know, she saw on TV that, you know, oh gosh, we had no idea. You know, the football administrators are like, we had no idea this stuff was going on. And she's like BS, she was a madam, actually. She wasn't, you know, she had her girls that she rented out, basically. And she said BS, they hired my girls all the time. So she came forward to her peril. And what ended up happening with her is she was another example of how, you know, people got punished for coming forward. She, you know, by coming forward and saying this happened and I have proof. You know, she was harassed, she was attacked. You know, people would throw boiling coffee at her or like big, super-sized drinks with ice at her. And she couldn't get a job, a legitimate job because her face and name were in the papers. And it was just at that time when people are starting to Google job applicants and stuff. So her life really got trashed by the case. But there was nothing, there was, there's no real protection for her at all. So I wanted, I didn't want the book to scare people away from, you know, coming forward and telling their stories and using their voice. But I did want to show how the culture really silences women, especially when women try to come forward and say, hey, this happened, I have proof. You know, there's a lot of backlash. She was fascinating, she was my favorite character in the whole book. I feel like we kind of felt that way too, some of us librarians that were reading it. And really, you know, writing about her in the book is nothing like she is in real life. She's so amazing in real life too. And she'll be possibly on the TV show, right? So we'll look forward to seeing whatever they do in that role. It happens, yeah. So, yeah, so something that we also wondered about. I know there's probably some aspiring writers or writers in the audience. Usually writers like to come to our author talks to get inspiration and they'll often ask questions about technique. So something that we wondered about was how will you interwoven your own personal stories so seamlessly with the legal case? And I have to say that I listened to this on audio and it, you know, it was difficult emotionally. It can be heavy at times, but it wasn't overwhelming in the sense of just being like endlessly depressing. You interweave quite a bit of humor there. And, you know, writing about the city and the landscape and other things like that. So was it a lot of work for you to do it that way or did it just kind of come out that way and kind of just, you know, come out like this beautiful tapestry that is? Well, first, thank you. And thanks for saying it seamless and beautiful. You know, when you're writing, nothing's easy. I don't know how many of you, how many of you are writers? Can you write for me? Those of you will admit it. Yeah, so, you know, it's never easy. So, whoever. The, you know, I was very reticent to tell my story. I'm, by trade, a fiction writer. So I'm used to writing fiction. And I had never written very much nonfiction before this book, just a couple essays really. And I had never originally intended to write nonfiction. So this was sort of one of those things like, well, I really do actually think I have to write this book. And then it was just, I just wasn't used to writing about myself at all. So I, and at first I wasn't going to, I was like, forget it. No way am I going to do that. But then I, you know, I was thinking through the project and I'm outlining and I'm figuring out all the things I'm going to say. I'm like, oh wow, I'm going to write about these women who risked their actual lives to bring this case forward who were so brave to, you know, on the plaintiff's side and also even the, you know, even the witnesses who were terrified to give their names. You know, and they had to do it anonymously. There were, there were so many people who invested so much and risked everything for this case. But I'm not going to tell my story. That's really cowardly. So I thought if I was going to have the integrity to write the story, I was going to have to tell my story. But I, I really did not want it to be the dominant story. I wanted the case to be the dominant story and for my personal history of sexual assault as a child to be the subplot. You know, and I, and I thought if I can, okay, if I order it that way, it will have a smoother pace and it won't be as unbearable when I bring it up because I'm only going to a subplot, you know, the subplot just supports the plot, right? So every time that there was an opportunity to give deeper meaning through my own personal experience, that's when I would bring in my story, but not otherwise. And that gave me some really strict guidelines that I could follow and made the process easier of curating my story because, you know, I could probably write like 10 books about my experience, right? But who would want to read them? So I thought in the context of this historic case, then that's when my story would be important. So did you find that this style of writing took more time than your normal fiction routine? You know, it was so different. So fiction is like, you know, anything can happen, right? Aliens can land, you know, or whatever. Everyone can turn purple, all right? So anything can happen. So the generation piece and all the choices you make in generation, that can take a long time. So my first book took three years. My second book, which is a novel, took 10, over 10 years. And then this book took significantly less time in the generation because you know the story. You know everything that happened. You only have to decide how to tell it, right? What to leave out and what to bring in and which techniques to use, right? So that piece was way faster. However, the editing, because you're dealing with real people who are alive and have feelings, that piece, the editing took so much longer. It took longer to edit than it took to write and revise it. So there's like writing, revision, editing, right? Usually the revision takes the most time of all those things. With nonfiction, the editing took the most time, which was a new experience for me. Well, as someone who's lived in Boulder for many years, I really loved your descriptions of the front range and especially Boulder and Netherland, where I often will go to ski or hike. Your memoir takes place during years of drought and fires in Colorado, juxtaposed with harsh winters. Did you intend for your landscape writing to reflect how you were feeling emotionally at the time? That is something that I kind of picked up on. And I love nature writing, and I just wondered, like, did you ever consider yourself a nature writer? Thank you. I'm really actually bad at writing about nature and setting. It's really, really hard for me, so I spend a lot of time on it. It's like when you're really bad at something, try harder, and so you get sometimes better at it than you would if you were naturally good at it sometimes. So it's not natural for me, but I thought in this case, I was writing about a system, a political and athletic system of sexual assault and corruption. So I'm writing about this corrupt university system, and I was like, well, we have a corrupt natural system of neglect, just like the university system. The university neglects women. We neglect our custodianship of nature. So there are the overgrown forests with the overgrown lodge holes, and then the pine beetles get in there, and then the whole thing's devastated, and then there's huge fires that just wipe everything out. And I was like, this is just like the university. It's just like the university. They're like, oh, it's nothing, nothing, nothing's happening here. There are no problems, no problems. There's this big inferno of scandal and newspaper reporting, and there's this five-year lawsuit that just blew everything up and changed law. I mean, that's the cool thing now. But before then, there was no sexual assault law. I mean, no, sorry, there was sexual assault law, but there's no sexual assault Title IX law. So now, if Title IX was about jerseys and football fields and basketball, like, oh, they have the nice courts, and we get the bad days, or they have the nice jerseys, we have the bad ones, they have better sneakers, that kind of thing, that's what Title IX was. And then now, when you hear Title IX, you think sexual assault, and that's because of this case, and all the chaos, all the inferno, the fire, the neglect, all of it kind of coming to the force. So I wanted there to be a mirror system there through the nature. Because I really only know how to write about people, so that's how I got away with my nature stuff. That worked for me. And as we've talked about before, there are multiple storylines in the book, the sexual assault case, your own abuse, the relationship with your mother, and the relationship with your husband. Or you were dating, I suppose, during a lot of it. We're still married. Everyone wants to know. I wasn't sure if I could ask that, but congratulations. He seems like a wonderful man. He's a very wonderful man. So which storyline did you find the most difficult to write about? Definitely my own history of sexual abuse, because I'm actually, I say here, sitting on a couch on the stage with a microphone in my hand, but I'm actually a very private person. I've had friends for maybe three decades that have never talked. We'll talk all the time, but we've never talked about what happened to me as a kid. They just know, I'll be like, oh, it was bad. And then I write a book that anyone can read, and some of them haven't been like, God, I never knew. I never knew. You never told me any of this stuff. My mother-in-law didn't know. So there's a lot of people who are huge in my life that I don't share this information. So that was pretty hard for me to do. But there's something about it, really. There's something about just saying, here I am. You plan a flag, and you say, here I am, and that's me, and what are you going to do to me that hasn't already been done? And somehow that creates an opening. It creates a little bit of a more space. It's a different way of walking in the world. It's more open, and really good things happen as a result. People have reached out to me and talked to me about their experiences. Some of them I know, some of them I've never met before. I've had readers come forward and say, wow, this helped me in these ways. And that's something that happens with nonfiction. It doesn't happen with fiction, you know, at all. But with nonfiction, you have that opportunity to create community in that way. So again, it was the hardest, but it's paid off the most, I think. I'll ask you a little bit more about that later on, about the stories that we tell. I want to segue here to touch on football a little bit because quite a bit of this book is about football, specifically local football here in Boulder with the university. But I just want to make the observation that football is a national obsession and it certainly is an obsession for our big universities due to the money it brings in, which you mentioned and you wrote that football is capitalism on steroids, that's a quote, and that this culture led to women being quote, unquote, sacrifice. As one player told you in an interview, and I'm just going to read what this player said to you, quote, I don't know anything about it, I wasn't there, but maybe one girl's discomfort is worth it if it means winning a championship. Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice for the greater good. So he's referring to sexual assault. And the question I wanted to ask you is, do you think the legal case you worked on has had a lasting impact on changing this culture here in Colorado and nationwide? Yes and no. And again, this is what I think it's not necessarily like gospel or whatever, but yes and then it created a new law. Again, like now if a college student is sexually assaulted in the name of college sport, it's not just a crime to be tried in criminal court, it is also a civil rights problem. It's a human rights violation that is about equality. So it has broadened the discussion of sexual assault to not just be about a crime, it's a terrible tragedy that happens at one point, but also an equality issue about do we all have equal access to education, do we all have equal access to safety in these places that are publicly funded, they're supposed to be equal for all of us. So those things have happened, there are new NCAA rules around recruiting that some people will obey. And also has anyone seen the chair? Have you seen the show the chair? Yeah, there's like a Netflix show the chair. So it's a small college and in the college there's a Title IX coordinator as a job. That job didn't exist before this case. And I was like, oh my gosh, we did that in the chair. But also in colleges all around America there are Title IX coordinators where something happens to you, you can come forth and make a complaint right there on campus. So those things changed. However I did go, it's very bizarre that CU keeps inviting me to come there. I've been there four or five times since this book came out. So I did a visit at a classroom there and we asked the students, you know, has anything changed? Because they all read the book and we were like, what's changed? And they're like, nothing's changed, nothing at all has changed. They said, if we go to a party and we get propositioned by a football player and we say no, we get called all sorts of names and harassed and followed to our car, you know. And they say, yeah, it's horrifying. And they say, you know, maybe they don't know of an incident like the assault that prompted this case, right? Which I don't think we covered, but it was an assault by 68 players and recruits on a female college student, you know. And it turns out there were many more victims that night actually. So they didn't know of an incident like that, at least in that classroom they didn't, but they said it's hero worship whenever the players walk through, you know, campus or whatever the crowds part, you know, like there's celebrities or if they enter a party. And also there's the problem that, you know, so you did recruit a player with 30 allegations of sexual assault and gave him a scholarship to come here. And also there are many, many allegations of sexual assault against Coach Prime, who is the head coach now at CU. And everyone's like, oh wow, we're going to start winning again. Coach Prime's here. But there are petitions circulating all around campus saying, you know, from survivors saying he did this to me, he did this to me, he did this to me, please get rid of this guy, you know, because you're bringing that culture right here to the person, you know, via the person in charge. So does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, thank you. And just to clarify for the audience, I think you're referring to, this came out in an article in the CU Independent March 8th of this year. And it was a report that CU has signed a football player with a four-year history of sexual misconduct allegations from their high school, I believe, from women that were at the high school. They did it 20 years ago, though. They did it 20 years ago with one of the characters, you know, I don't remember which alias I gave him, but he had assaulted, he and another player had assaulted a woman the night of her graduation, and she woke up alone in the woods. And then there was DNA, his DNA, and there was positive rape kit. And if you don't know much about rape kits, they try and show rape, they prove for rape not for sex. So if there's a positive rape kit, it means someone was raped. So she was raped, he did it, and the DA wouldn't prosecute. So they still brought him to campus, and then he did it again and again. Thank you. So given that Tell Me Everything addresses some folks' controversial topics, since its publication last year, has there been any pushback or backlash that you've faced? Yes. So it was 2020 Thanksgiving week, and I got a phone call from two attorneys saying, we heard you're publishing this book, and guess what? You can't. You can't do it. At that point, the book, you know, I had written it under contract, and revised it seven times. It was also revised additional, I don't know, three times by my editor, and it was copy edited twice. It was three quarters away through a legal review where they paid way more than they paid me. They paid this lawyer to go line by line through the book. So the publisher had invested a lot in this book. Not, I didn't get the money, but other people did, and a lot of labor and staff. So they were like, no, sorry, you can't do it. And I said, why? And they said legal blah, blah, blah. And I said, what's that mean? And they said, oh, everyone knows what that means. And I actually knew these lawyers, and I thought they, I didn't, I don't know why, but I didn't think they deliberately lie. I thought maybe they're mistaken, but I didn't think, I know some of you are laughing, maybe you're lawyers. So I was frantic, and I immediately told my publisher, and they said, well, we don't know if this is true, right? What they're alleging. We don't know if this is true. We need to shut it down for a while until you figure this out, right? So, and on that terrible phone call, you know, I'm crying, and they said, tell you what, tell you what. You send us the main script, we'll edit it and redact what we think shouldn't go there, and we'll decide if it should be published at all. You just give us editorial control, and we'll do that for you. It's going to be a lot of weekends for us, and oh my gosh, so much work, but we'll do that for you as a favor to you, right? So when they did that, I was like, oh, they think I'm dumb. I'm going to run with that. So I'm like, okay, yeah, I'll do whatever you want. I'll do whatever you want, right? And I immediately, you know, and I call my publisher, and then I got to talk to 20 lawyers in two weeks, and they all said the same thing pretty much. They were like, I have no idea what this is, how this could be true, but it would require a lot of research because there's not really a precedent that I can think of, you know, and they all offered me half off, but half off of 600 bucks an hour is way more than I had. So, and it was COVID, and, you know, my husband's acupuncturist's office had closed down for a while. We were on lockdown, you know, and he's still coming back from that, and we were just not in the place for that. Luckily, I worked for a lighthouse where I just workshop in Denver, which is a nonprofit, and they're not just about the classes, they're also about advocacy. So I finally told my boss, and she's like, I'm on it. She found, she got me a lawyer for free, and I don't know how, but she did, and then it took another few months of just research to lawyers going, you know, and then finally they were like, well, there's just nothing we can figure out that's true here, you know? So then it was, then I had to get all these out. But, David, it was a big mess. Like, it was just, you know, the way I think of it is my car once broke down in the middle of Texas, in the very middle of Texas, and the only, and one thing I realized when I was broken down in Texas is the only way out of Texas is through a whole lot more Texas, you know? And in this case, the only way out of this legal mess is through a whole lot more lawyers and then, but we eventually got out of it. The book has covers. Nobody can stop that now. And I haven't heard a peep from them after that intense seven months of bullying. So I don't know, I don't know what that was about, but it was a definite pushback, and I've had other pushback as well. Like someone went after my events and closed them down. So there's a lot, you know, there's a lot about law and a lot about justice that really is about thuggery. And if you can sort of navigate that and keep that in mind, I think you have a little better of a chance of surviving it. But it's been a difficult process, really. I'm so sorry to hear that. It's depressing and disturbing that that's happened. I feel like you're all my therapists now and I need to pay you all $100 an hour, $150 or whatever it is. So I wanted to point out that even while you were writing about these football players that had committed these pretty horrible crimes, you still had compassion for them because you were mindful of their possible brain injury. And you put a lot of statistics into this book. I was pretty blown away by the statistics on the brain injury of the football players. So when, even as you were interviewing, I noticed that you kind of interspersed, like, who knows what they've gone through with their mind? And that might be affecting how they're responding to my questions or, you know, their outlook on things. So I just wanted to point that out. Have you found that your book has helped to educate people about this ongoing issue of the brain trauma? Right. So, you know, you assaulted the main client and the other ones, actually. All the people who did all those assaults that night, they were starters, right? And if you're a starter, by then, you not only have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, did I say that right? Yeah, CTE, you know, from getting hit in the head all the time through high school and college. But you also are very likely to have a steroid addiction, you know, so there's drug addiction, there's brain damage, and then there's also just the hormones and very big people and sudden fame and all the things that are going on there, right? And this is part of why the lawyer that I worked for was like, this is not a crime, just a crime, it's crime, absolutely crime, but it's also the system of crime, right? It's a system that creates crime when you put all these things together. I don't know if my book has raised awareness. I think there's just a lot of apathy about it and I wonder if there's some racism to the apathy because a lot of these people are starters, they come from very poor backgrounds, they're often African-American, and I wonder if it's just people not valuing African-American neurology as much as they might if all those kids were white. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question, but it's a speculation. I wonder why, though, this isn't of primary importance in an educational institution, right? When to care about the brains of the people who are going there, right? But no, instead they're letting them literally destroy their minds. And talking to these players is different from talking... It really is kind of like talking to people with mental illnesses, right? Things change very quickly and you don't see why and there's danger and it was actually very scary talking to some of these men because all of a sudden they're furious and then the fury is gone and then they're confused and they can't follow... They wouldn't be able to follow some of them, they wouldn't be able to follow a sentence that was more than a certain number of words. So it was... You know, again, I'm not apologizing for sexual assault. Those are choices that those people made. Those are their choices. However, the system sure didn't help. It sure put them in that position of making those choices. Being able to make those choices without any consequences, no ramifications. Thank you. So there's multiple traumas happening in the book and the pain and there's also suffering for the football players. But your trauma does come out and I noticed that you were writing about your own trauma and you struggled to describe it and I just want to read this quote because I love this so much. You wrote, pain is its own language. Each description feels false, decorative. Like, I'm pouring watercolors into the crater of a bomb site. See, I'm failing even now. It was anything but poetry. And I read that and I said, well, wait, this is poetry. It's so beautiful. I mean, I don't know how that can't be described as poetry. And I mean, so I guess I just want to ask you, like, while it must have been very difficult to put your own suffering on the page, did you at least find doing so cathartic? Yeah, and absolutely. And also there's an element that if you are considering this book and you are a survivor of sexual violence, you should probably know that I was pretty careful not to go very graphic on it. I tried to stay with the facts of the violence, both for the people in the case and also with myself. But I never could ever read those books where it's like every, you know, it's too much, it's too hard to read. And I knew that there would be survivors reading the story, so I was like, I wanted to make it as safe for them to read as possible. And I knew even just the facts, even newspaper-like journalistic facts were going to be pretty hard, you know. I'm sorry, I totally forgot what the question was. Oh no, I guess you were kind of touching on that about how, you know, does it help you to... Oh yeah, does it cathartic? Yeah, to work through that, and then I guess just to... I think we're running low on time, but to know like, would you recommend this for other survivors of sexual abuse or assault? And do you see memoir writing as a form of therapy with the potential to help survivors of all kinds of trauma? I think it had reached out to you from all around the country that had, you know, it had really reached them and they wanted to connect with you. Right, I think, you know, like there's so much shame in silence around sexual assault. People are still blamed, you know, for what was done to them, right? So it's a real moment of trust if someone discloses, right? And they don't know if they're going to be met with denial or with love or with compassion or with I believe you or with really, you know, or what, you know, why didn't you do this or why didn't you do that, right? So any kind of disclosure and connection is very, very, very difficult for survivors of sexual assault, most of them, most of us. But a book, you can buy a book. You don't even have to go into a bookstore to buy a book now, right? You don't even have to take it to the counter and be like, this is me, right? You can buy it online, have it delivered to you and you can read it and you can connect with the book, right, in a safe way without worrying about judgment, without worrying about any kind of thing that's going to compromise, you know, compromise you and make you feel that you shouldn't have said a word, you know? It's a different form of love, you know, and connection and community. And that's one thing I love about books. I don't know if maybe you feel you're a librarian and you've devoted your whole life to books. I imagine you might feel the same way, like you get to connect in this intimate way without the same kind of risk, you know? And, you know, people can let you down but a book is way less likely to do that. So I think, you know, for me it was good to write it and I think it's, it's, I think it's, for me, connecting with other survivors through books has been important as well through reading. Yeah. And you also write about how folks open up to you because you really listen to them. You gave them, like, just this undivided attention and I feel like, I guess I wanted to ask you about how that reflects on our society today where they would tell you these things, a perfect stranger, right? That they wouldn't tell anyone else and does it mean that folks feel like there's this longing to be really listened to and really understood for who they are that they're somehow not getting? Right, right. My husband is a, he's a, he's Taoist and he, you know, he's done a lot of meditation and a lot of compassion work and he said, once he's like, compassion, I remember this, he said, you know, everyone talks about compassion like it's this, you know, wonderful feeling. He's like, compassion hurts. Compassion's uncomfortable. If you feel what someone else is feeling, their pain, it's horrible. It's horrible to feel someone else's pain, you know? And that's why, but we should, I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, right? Like we should still do it, but like it's, it's a real difficulty on your psyche to do it and that's why people shut people down. They don't listen. They don't want to hear it. The story is socially unacceptable for the situation. Maybe they're at a cocktail party or whatever. So when someone will start to talk, a lot of times people will send the cues like, oh gosh, I'm really sorry that happened to you and like lean back a little bit or, you know, look away or, you know, there's the go away vibe, you know? And I don't think I had any like special thing. I think I just didn't do that, you know? And I think it would be a better world if we just listened to each other really and allowed ourselves to feel uncomfortable for the sake of really connecting with someone, you know? Because maybe that person really needed to say that thing. Maybe they needed to tell you about what happened with them and their day's going to be a little bit better. And maybe your day could just be that little bit more uncomfortable or sadder because you can take it, it's not your tragedy. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah. No, thank you. And I just want to wrap this up by saying that I love the ending of your epilogue where you write about who you are quote between the seams of your scars and that, you know, there's this need to be seen for who you are by truly sharing your story with others, that's sort of what we are talking about and helping others by doing that right and connecting. So thank you for writing this Erika on behalf of the women in your story and on behalf of sexual abuse and assault survivors everywhere. And we will now take time for your questions. We ask that you please raise your hand and a mic will be brought to you in order to answer as many questions from the audience as possible. Please keep them brief. There will be time afterwards to talk with Erika at the book signing if you would like to share a personal story. So we've got a couple librarians on either side that will look up for your hand, I guess. If you do have a question. Hi Erika. Hi. You mentioned that, you know, the culture at CU really hasn't changed any. But I am curious if out of the book there's maybe some other sort of support groups that maybe you just didn't know about yet or, you know, that maybe the survivors from your story have, maybe it's not happening on the CU campus but maybe there's some other support groups that might be happening at other campuses that you might know about. Yeah, I mean, actually one of the CU events that I went and did, it's so bizarre, it's so bizarre. But there was a student group that they were starting, actually they were beginning a sexual assault alliance like it's for allies and also for people who are survivors of sexual assault. And it was more motivated toward social change, safety on campus, those kinds of things. And so I talked to the two people who were starting that. So I think it's there. Again, like it's hard to know if the right people, the people who need it are finding out about it. You know, there's a lot going on on campus, especially the large one. So I don't know how widespread that is, you know, as far as support's concerned. And there are, this is also like Wordenburg, you know, the health area and places of referral. The thing that's difficult for a lot of people is when they've been attacked, they don't always feel safe enough to ask for the help. So that can be the problem. So unless these kinds of support networks are super visible, it's difficult for people to know that they're there, you know, enough to, because they're not going to go around asking. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I think they do exist, yeah. Good question. I have read the book and it occurred to me that this whole thing is a system of sacrificial lambs. The women are being sacrificed and the young men are being sacrificed. Nobody knows, you know, nobody's telling them what the likely outcome of their involvement is going to be. And they're so young, you know, their brains haven't quite filled out yet like their bodies have. So it made me wonder about the whole system. Why is the system of adults turning these people into sacrificial lambs? What's behind all this? Is it profit? Is it funding from alumni? What do you think? I think you hit on it. I think there's a lot of money. There's so much money behind this college football system and also football in general. There's just enormous amounts of money. And unfortunately our value system, I say it's not my value system and I don't think it's many of your value system, but in this country, often money gives people places of special privilege over marginalized communities, over women, et cetera. I feel like a lot of our value system in this country plays to power through that financial power, right? So I think there's this idea of like, okay, well that's just one person, but there's all this money and all this power. And also you've seen football. It's more than an obsession. I think it's a religion. You said obsession, I think it's a religion. I think it unites people and they feel like they're part of something bigger. And who are the people? And oh, well, we're just sacrificing the brains of these young people, but maybe they, you know, again, I think there might be some racism around it, just because a lot of the people who are getting hurt are African-American. So I think there's a skewed value system that isn't my value system and clearly probably isn't your value system either. But again, around profit, around money, around power. That's heartless, you're right, absolutely. Yeah. So I had your next question. This might be a bit technical, but... Oh, okay, thank you. In so many memoirs written by women that I've read, I've noticed that there's almost always a relationship storyline and I was curious with regards to the book for you why it felt important for you to include your storyline with your husband. Well, he's awesome. Also, you know, the book has a lot of really dark, you know, cynical, like, you know, there's a lot of difficult stuff and part of the way I got through it in the moment, and I thought maybe part of the way that a reader might get through a difficult book is through the hope that a relationship, a happy relationship can bring, and this relationship, I mean, the beginning of my marriage, you know, like my lifelong relationship with my partner, you know, the person in my life, right? So it's this sort of, you know, this... So, you know, part of it was just, it was the fact of the matter, right? But also, I thought it would give a little bit of relief also to it. You know, and he, as a person, I mentioned like a balancing measure, you know, I'm going off the rails and doing really bad stuff. I mean, like, there's stuff that I did that I wrote about in there, and some of it's still there, but some of his lawyers, like, you got to take this out, or you're going to get arrested, you know? You can't have this in this book, right? You can't admit to these things. So I'm kind of going, like, I'm spiraling, and he was very steady in his very moral person and with a lot of integrity. So he was a good counterpoint, both in the moment, but also narratively for the sociopathic person that I was in the book, right? Like, I'm like, you know, again, like when I say moral flexibility, you know? Think, like, Cirque du Soleil level of flexibility, right? You know, whereas he was always right there, like, you know, this isn't right and you should watch out for this. And so it was, so, you know, both was the truth of the matter, but it was also the, you know, I felt like it was needed in a narrative level as well. But I got permission, I asked first. Any questions? Sorry, that was louder than I thought it was. So given that students are only on campus for, like, four to maybe six years, and the staying power of university athletics is so much longer than that, what do you think that students and advocates can do to make the problem any better? Because there are students who want to, but I think you mentioned in the book, like, students graduate, they leave, and then we're seeing now, like, it's literally the same thing that it was in 2002. Right, right, yeah. So what do you think about that? So that's a wonderful question. I have a lot of opinions. I think the whole system needs to be revamped, but that's never going to happen. This is never going to happen. I mean, so put that aside as an option that I really like. But aside from that, it's usually, you know, when I was at CU, I asked, I was like, what would happen if there was a game and nobody came? What would happen then? Because these, you know, at the athletic department, they track when there's like a 3% dip in ticket sales, you know, they notice, right? What if people, instead of being like, well, I really hate that part of it, but I really want to see the game, you know, or my friends are going or whatever, you know, like what if there was more of an organized effort to draw awareness to this issue and to demand change, you know, and the way all social change usually happens is it's just a very small handful of very mouthy people, you know, very loud people, and then people hear them and they say, me too, yeah, that, well, absolutely, you know, and it starts that way, but it really does take that initial core group of people to organize, and that's, I think, the harder thing to find is the people who are like, okay, I'm going to fall on this sword. This is the sword I'm going to fall on, you know. So I think change usually happens from within, more than from without, you know, even when there are new regulations placed, for example, people don't, especially in athletics, they don't follow them, they just don't. They'll be like, well, we're supposed to do that, but we don't do it, right? So I do think it would have to come from within, it would have to hit them. If they value money over women's safety and non-binary people's safety, then money's where you got to hit them. So, but again, that takes organization, and I know I can't do it. So maybe you could do it. That's a good question. Hi, Erica. Hi. The book was amazing, I thought. Thank you. My heart hurt for you when I read about your particular troubles and your mother not reacting as I felt, you know, a mother might. Could you address that a little more? I've been struggling with it and with your relationship. Right. So I have this theory that, you know, if you ever watch a James Bond movie, you know, there's the villain. Usually the villain's pretty forgettable, but the henchman, that's the interesting person, right? There's the guy with the teeth, remember Jaws? He had the metal teeth, or the guy with a hat, he could slice off a concrete statue's head with a hat, you know? The henchmen are usually the ones who are like, they'll just go to great lengths to kind of bolster the villain, right? In my dynamic, you know, what my mother was that person, supporting the person I call X, who's my abuser. So there's a lot of people who are like, I can't understand how a mother could do that, you know? Unfortunately, I do understand that, you know, I do understand how that works. The system of denial, it becomes an investment for people. So they'll, you know, they'll, again, it starts with that saying no, right? Or like not listening, right? It starts with that thing we were just talking about, right? And of the like, well, you know, I don't know if I believe you, or I don't know if I can, this is too uncomfortable for me. And then instead of recanting that with further evidence, they'll often double down. Well, no. And I think we've seen that in our country, you know, with the political systems, you know, well, okay, well, you know, no, that didn't happen. And oh, and that didn't happen either, and that, and that, and that, and that, and neither did the insurrection, right? So there's a tendency for people to get stronger in their opposition to truth once they've already taken a step away from it. And that's difficult when that's a person that you rely on, such as a mother, you know? It was very difficult for me to write about that too, because I, you know, I don't want to cause any pain. I don't, that's not what I wanted with this book at all, you know? I just want to tell the truth. But I knew that as soon as I started writing about my family dynamic, any hope of reconciliation was going to be gone forever. So when the night before the book came out, I remember being like, crap, you know? Like, this is the final nail on the coffin. And in a relationship can be, you know it's doomed. There's no, you're not gonna, it's never gonna happen. But there's still a little bit of hope, right? You can't, you can't never get rid of that last tiny molecule of hope. And publishing this book was like, that's gone now. You know, I think of calculus, I think you're always dividing, trying to get to zero. Is that right? Do I have, I never took it, I don't, that's what people tell me anyway. Like, but there's always something. There's never nothing, you know? But with this book, I was like, I'm gonna have this book and I'm gonna have nothing in that hope, for that hope, right? So I agree, that was the most troubling thing. That was one of the most troubling relationships for me to write, too, actually. That was a great question. Yeah. How are we in time? Hi. Okay, hi, thank you for writing this book. Thank you. It's very important for all of us, for men, women, children, teenagers, to have some understanding of what's going on. So I was curious about this dilemma or dissonance or discomfort that you had about going into the interviewing and then at some point coming out the other side and being a perpetrator of sorts, of causing some kind of discomfort, of asking people. And I thought you described it well. Do you think that's inevitable for those of us who want to take a step in a positive direction? You mean, you think the damage is inevitable? Is that what you mean? Yeah, do we slip over at some point and become that person that is saying, I mean, I'm not going to exploit you, but please come, please come, testify, tell your truth and then we beg and we borrow and sort of steal to get them there for the greater good in a way. Right, right. And you know, one thing that, you know, Grayson, this is Alias, he was pretty good at getting anonymity for a lot of the witnesses and it was really interesting the way he did it. Like, you know, he described it as the recipe, it's like the recipe for Coke, right? Like Coca-Cola, like this person knows this piece and this person knows that piece and no one really had all the pieces together, right? So in those cases, the risk was diminished. It still was there, you know. But some people were public and they were like, I'm just going to hear, you know, they were like, here I am, you know, this happened, right? So, and then me as this person trying to get all this information out of people, right, that maybe they, sometimes I was the first person they told about what happened to them, that it did make, it gave me huge mixed feelings because again, I don't think this country offers a safe space for people to tell their stories. I think people are punished often for doing so, which makes me bananas when people are saying, oh, she just wants the attention. You know, she's saying that story to get the attention or the money. I'm like, there's no attention, there's no money. Like, you have to hire a lawyer, you pay money and the attention is almost universally that you get back is negative. So people do take these enormous risks to do it. I have to think, so again, I feel like I have very mixed feelings about it, but I have to tip on the end of, you know, that these people really do need to tell their stories. They need to say, they need to see something happen that changes things, you know. So I have to sort of go on the end that, you know, it's trial by fire basically, or, you know, they're running through, they're doing the gauntlet and they're getting hurt. However, on the other hand, they're going to be stronger for it. I have to hope that, you know. I don't know if it's true, but I have to hope that. And I feel like the same was a little bit true of me with writing this book. I was like, it's so hard, it's so hard. But on the other end, I felt like I'm going to be stronger for that and they're going to be parts of my life that I can, you know, now they're between covers, you know, I don't have to, they're not this open wound that I keep bumping against, you know. But as far as, like, the impact on each individual, that's only for that individual to determine whether or not it's worth it to them, that they, you know, have to pry into their lives and try and bring them into a lawsuit, you know. I can't answer for them and say, yeah, it's worth it, you know, because that's so individual, you know. I hope, though, it's my dearest hope that it is, yeah. Another great question. You guys are amazing. You're great. I see things moving, but I don't know if there are questions. Oh, hi, over here. It seems like these coaches and maybe surrounding supportive staff are a really big part of perpetuating this. Can you say something about that? They are bad people. No, I mean, I actually believe that. But yeah, there's, again, there's this strange culture in football where it's only, it's about the team. And the way it was explained to me is that if you are not, if you don't back up your team members, when you're on the field, you could get killed. If people aren't, they don't have your back, because this is a simulated war, right? So there's a, you know, there's a 300-pound guy coming at you and the guy who's supposed to protect you is like, ah, you're on your own, then you're in trouble. So there can't be any nonconformists in the team. These coaches, they came up through that same system, right? That the team above everything. Plus they have an enormous amount of power, an enormous amount of money, right? They get paid so much money, you know? The head coach for this case was paid $3 million to quit. That was his, like, payout. And the main plaintiff of the case didn't even get that much for winning and enduring all the harassment and the threats and everything, right? So you've got this money, you've got this power, and plus overall mentality that football is a good in itself and there are hard sacrifices in the sport anyway. People get, you know, there's no, and I've never heard of a coach when a player gets a concussion being like, that's my fault, I should have protected my, you know, I should have protected my people on the team. But it is their fault, you know? Like, if someone gets like, you know, five concussions in a season or whatever, that's that coach's fault, right? They should have safety measures, right? So there's a lot of shedding of responsibility that happens at that higher level and also happened at the higher level at the university with the college president, et cetera. There's no one else to blame. Great question. We'll take one more question. Have we said it all? We have one more in the front. I feel like I should just give you my mic. Thanks for running around and I hope you have your Fitbit on. I was just curious. I saw you're going to have another book coming out. I was curious what kind of book it will be. Oh, thank you. I just actually turned it in last Friday to my editor. So I rigged this two-book deal. Like, because I initially just wanted to publish a collection of short stories, but no one buys those. No one wants them. Like, we would have actually gotten more offers for my memoir if I didn't insist that they also published a short story collection. They'd rather just not deal with it at all. So that's good. I know I'm really talking this up in a great way, but it's going to be a short story collection. It's called Save Me. And each story revolves around a notion of, like, rescue, you know, rescuers, rescued people in different aspects of what that means. I've been working on that story for a long time, those stories for a long time. But I don't know when that's coming out. If they have their way, probably never. But it has to, according to my contract. So probably another year, year and a half or two, maybe. Sometime in 2024, I think. Thank you. And thank you. All right. Well, thanks everyone for coming. And thank you, Erica. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you, Janelle. So, yeah. So Erica will decamp to the lobby if you would like to have her sign her wonderful memoir. Tell me everything. She will be out there. And I hope you'll have a wonderful evening. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much. Oh, also, I'll be wearing a mask because I don't want to be a super spreader by signing books. But I'm not sick. Thanks for coming.