My Name Is Trauma

A Study Guide for Elizabeth Strout's "My Name is Lucy Barton", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

“Zirin is America’s best sportswriter.”—Lee Ballinger, Rock and Rap Confidential “Zirin is one of the brightest, most audacious voices I can remember on the sportswriting scene, and my memory goes back to the 1920s.”—Lester Rodney, N.Y. Daily Worker sports editor, 1936–1958 “Zirin has an amazing talent for covering the sports and politics beat. Ranging like a great shortstop, he scoops up everything! He profiles the courageous and inspiring athletes who are standing up for peace and civil liberties in this repressive age. A must read!”—Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive “This is cutting-edge analysis delivered with wit and compassion.”—Mike Marqusee, author, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties Here Edgeofsports.com sportswriter Dave Zirin shows how sports express the worst, as well as the most creative and exciting, features of American society. Zirin explores how Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl flash-time show exposed more than a breast, why the labor movement has everything to learn from sports unions and why a new generation of athletes is no longer content to “play one game at a time” and is starting to get political. What’s My Name, Fool! draws on original interviews with former heavyweight champ George Foreman, Olympian and black power saluter John Carlos, NBA basketball player and anti-death penalty activist Etan Thomas, antiwar women’s college hoopster Toni Smith, Olympic Project for Human Rights leader Lee Evans and many others. Popular sportswriter and commentator Dave Zirin is editor of The Prince George’s Post (Maryland) and writes the weekly column “Edge of Sports” (edgeofsports.com). He is a senior writer at basketball.com. Zirin’s writing has also appeared in The Source, Common Dreams, College Sporting News, CounterPunch, Alternet, International Socialist Review, Black Sports Network, War Times, San Francisco Bay View and Z Magazine.

From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel, to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists—much of which has been foundational in situating black women within the matrix of sociopolitical thought and practice in the United States. Scandalize My Name builds upon the rich tradition of this work while approaching the study of black female representation as an opening onto a critical contemplation of the vagaries of black social life. It makes a case for a radical black subject-position that structures and is structured by an intramural social order that revels in the underside of the stereotype and ultimately destabilizes the very notion of “civil society.” At turns memoir, sociological inquiry, literary analysis, and cultural critique, Scandalize My Name explores topics as varied as serial murder, reality television, Christian evangelism, teenage pregnancy, and the work of Toni Morrison to advance black feminist practice as a mode through which black sociality is both theorized and made material.

‘A compulsive, didn’t-see-it-coming thriller’ ABIGAIL DEAN, international bestselling author of Girl A One twin vanished. One twin reappeared.

The daughter at the center of the international bestseller Not Without My Daughter completes her story: escaping from Iran, growing up in fear, battling deadly disease, and learning to forgive. Two decades ago, millions of readers worldwide thrilled to the story told in the international bestseller Not Without My Daughter—subsequently made into a film starring Sally Field—that told of an American mother and her six-year-old child’s daring escape from an abusive and tyrannical Iranian husband and father. Now the daughter returns to tell the whole story, not only of that imprisonment and escape but of life after fleeing Tehran: living in fear of re-abduction, enduring recurring nightmares and panic attacks, attending school under a false name, battling life-threatening illness—all under the menacing shadow of her father. This is the story of an extraordinary young woman’s triumph over life-crushing trauma to build a life of peace and forgiveness. Taking readers from Michigan to Iran and from Ankara, Turkey, to Paris, France, My Name Is Mahtob depicts the profound resilience of a wounded soul healed by faith in God’s goodness and in his care and love. And Mahmoody reveals the secret of how she liberated herself from a life of fear, learning to forgive the father who had shattered her life and discovering joy and peace that comes from doing so.

This book is a series of letters to the children I aborted when I was seventeen. These letters detail the events just prior to becoming pregnant by rape and the horrendous events that unfolded as a result of my decision to abort. The letters begin with my addressing them as "blobs" because that is how the professionals referred to them at the time. They evolve into my understanding the reasons why I was depressed, suicidal, involved in an abusive relationship, and estranged from my life. With the love and grace that I found in my Savior, Jesus Christ, I was able to look at the abortions honestly and come to terms with the fact that they were not blobs at all, but instead my precious children. This truth brought healing and hope in the light of God's loving kindness. Endorsement "A can't-put-down page-turner! In letters of confession to her unborn babies, the author logs her maternal journey through rebellion and tragedies. Once God renders her darkest moments, transforming them by His Son's light, she uses her story as invitations to others to come taste and see His life-changing grace." --Nita Weis, PhD, psychologist and author "At the age the 15 state laws allowed me to make the decision to take an innocent life. Pain, isolation and self-destructive behaviors shadowed my life after that. Reading Anna's story revealed the guilt behind the patterns in my own life as I struggled to believe the lie that the life of an unborn child holds no true value. I punished myself because somehow I knew the truth - it does. "My Name Is Mom" shares God's message of love and redemption that needs to be heard by every young girl and woman suffering from the trauma of abortion." - Lea Anderson Age 42