In the excerpt of introduction and chapter one of Jessica Stern's Denial, I learned a great deal about her. Her job was to visit dangerous places and get into the minds of terrorists. This is something that most people would fear but it was something that Jessica Stern took great pride and enjoyment in.
When she was 15 she and her sister were raped by who she assumed was a stranger. This event in her life always left her with a sense of being incomplete. When she got older she got diagnosed as having post traumatic stress disorder as a result of the rape. At that point she realized that she didn't want to live in the past anymore. She didn't want to allow that fear control how she lived her life now. She made it her mission to understand the deeper motivations of those who hurt others- including the man that had hurt her and her younger sister that October day in 1973. The case that had been filed involving Jessica and her sister had been closed since 1974 as a result of her father telling police that a mere 4 months later "that he believes that the girls forgot the event". In 2006 she went to the police in Concord to view the file. The Lieutenant that opened the case said that he would need the help of Jessica to recall the details of that night. This presents the methodology that was used by Jessica Stern. She decided to go through her mind and ask herself logical questions that she would ask a terrorist and apply them to her own terrorist- the man that raped her and her sister. By opening and viewing the police report Jessica was hoping to connect fact with feeling- something that she seemed to be lacking. She looked through the file and found a handwritten list that she wrote back in 1973. The police wanted her to write down all that had happened that night event by event. She had only written a few words down for each thing that took place. When she was sitting down in 2006 looking at the file she beagn to piece together these smaller things from paper and recall them vividly in her mind. This was at sometimes painful for her to recall but as she went down the list everything became a little less hazy.
All of the points that I mentioned above directly relate to oral history. They aply to oral hisory because Jessica had to engage her mind by asking herself questions to provoke her memory of what had happened in the past. What she really wanted to realize was what the reason why she was the way that she was to this day. It was a result of her being raped and having to deal with the stress from that. It was something that damaged her. She went on afterwards to live a successful life but it was something that she never forgot. It also illustrates the methodology of oral history because she wanted to understand the events and the experiences of her past within her living memory. If she is able to understand what happened to her in the past (being that she was so young) she could apply it to how she is as an adult and why certain things phase her and others dont. She mentioned in the beginning that she was scared of being in crowded places with a lot of people but that going to foreign countries and seeing dangerous terrorists didnt make her fearful. By reopening that day that forever changed her life Jessica was able to asses why she is the way she is today. Another methodology that Stern used in a sense is autobiography because she was retelling in her mind the events that happened when she was younger.
The limitations of Evans's chapter on autobiography apply to Jessica Sterns book because Evans stated that the object of an autobiography is that it needs to make you feel emphatic towards the subject that you are reading about instead of focusing soley on the facts. An autobiography needs to make you feel the emotion while you are reading it. When I was reading it there were so many parts that were hard to read. It was so detailed and in some parts I felt absolutely discusted. As a women it was even harder to take because it made me realize that this was an everyday event that could happen to any women. It made me really feel for her even though she was an adult recalling this story. It made me want to read the rest of the book.
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