Laurie Halse Anderson reaches back into her parents’s past, in part to convey how people repress all kinds of traumas, not only sexual ones. She tells of her father, who had horrific experiences as a soldier assigned to Dachau at the end of the Second World War. Amidst the horror of the countless bodies he and his comrades found, one day he was able to help a woman give birth as she was walking along the road outside. The experiences weighed so heavily on him that he did not tell her about them until decades later.

Then they sent him to Dachau.

Not just him, of course, his whole unit,

and not just to Dachau, but to all the camps,

because the War was over,

But not really.

Daddy didn’t talk to me for forty years

about what he saw, what he heard, smelled,

and what he did about it.

Using a personal experience, Anderson helps the reader think about the problem of faculty who sexually harass students. She recounts experiences from her college years, when she was studying linguistics and planning to be a translator. One of the incidents she presents is of sexual harassment that did not develop into sexual assault but that influenced her to change her course of study. When she went to a meeting with a professor in his office to discuss her course of study, he abruptly suggested a sexual relationship based on their association in a past life.

the department head said we had been lovers

centuries earlier

we’d been Aztecs, had sex in the jungle,

he said that we were cosmic soul mates

and needed to have sex again, unite our bodies—

I walked out.

One point that Anderson raises is that there is a vast amount of misinformation in circulation about definitions of sexual assault, including rape, especially in regard to what constitutes consent. The idea of “stranger danger” persists among young people. Anderson notes that in her frequent speaking engagements about Speak, an audience member regularly questions the application of rape to what happened to the character of Melinda in the book. A young male will question the girl’s emotional reaction to being sexually assaulted.

there’s always that guy

in the back row wearing a jersey . . .

he’s a good boy he asks the first real question

“Why was Melinda so upset?

I mean, it wasn’t a bad guy with a gun

who dragged her down an alley;

she liked the guy, danced with him,

she kissed him,

so what’s the big deal?”

Anderson effectively uses poetry to raise important points about having a voice. She is a strong advocate for the importance of listening to others to oneself, as well as the importance of not being dissuaded from sharing one’s story. Well-intentioned advice may not help people in crisis because they feel that what they are saying is not being heard. People need to acknowledge that there are monsters in their nightmares

too many grown-ups tell kids to follow their dreams

like that’s going to get them somewhere

Auntie Laurie says follow your nightmares instead

cuz when you figure out what’s eating you

you can slay it.