Lacy M. Johnson: Moving the Conversation Toward Justice
Photo by John Carrithers.
The author on her new book of essays about activism, the failure to reckon, and extracting power from pain.
Lacy M. Johnson often gets asked, “What would you like to see happen to your rapist?” The question usually comes from readers of The Other Side, her 2014 memoir about being kidnapped and raped by her boyfriend, who planned to kill her. Her latest collection of essays, The Reckonings (Scribner), is an attempt to answer this question, and, more broadly, address the complexities of seeking retribution.
Each essay in the collection grapples with an injustice that includes and goes beyond the self: from sexual assault to the death penalty to environmental disaster. There is no “irritable reaching” for certainty as John Keats put it. Through each exacting and deliberate examination, Johnson’s project moves ideas of justice beyond vengeance, into compassion, mercy, and grace. She contends deeply with injustice, including a frank admission and in-depth exploration of her own white privilege in the essay “Against Whiteness.” At the very heart of her thesis is that “the failure to reckon” may be the greatest injustice of all.
During a talk she gave at the Tin House 2018 Summer Workshop, Johnson confronted the criticism waged against her memoir The Other Side, that she was unlikeable. She responded by asserting, “As if by labeling me unlikable, they don’t have to listen to the story I needed to tell.” Women, she says, who are ambitious, who are good at their jobs, who tell the truth, who don’t take shit, who burn bridges, who know their worth, are unlikable. She concludes, “I am not good at singing…but I know I write like a bad motherfucker.” And she does.
The Reckonings is Johnson’s third book, and The Other Side was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Houston and teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University.
Johnson and I spoke via telephone on a bleak Monday in September, against the backdrop of the seventeenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Hurricane Florence was bearing down and mandatory evacuation orders had been issued for coastal communities within the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, all too familiar to Johnson, Houston Flood Museum curator, who had lived through and writes about Hurricane Harvey which hit Houston in 2017. Kavanaugh’s