On a summertime evening in 1984, nineteen-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a guy assaults her at blade stage. After a spirit chilling struggle she manages to flee and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she recognizes him, and he’s arrested.

Fast forwards 2014, thirty years after her assault, when her existence, once again, appears to be about What A Body Remembers: A Memoir of Sexual Assault and its own Aftermath crumbling. As she stumbles her way through the days, navigating a dying marriage, devastating financial reduction, and an older mother slipping into dementia at disheartening quickness, she becomes fascinated with her own anxiety, by the PTSD still brought on by the sound of footsteps and she wonders, why does the body keep in mind what your brain tries so desperately to neglect? Her questions prompt an obsession with her assailant: Whatever became of him? What is he doing right now? She begins a search of excavation, decided to find out, tracking down the police report and courtroom file from her case, and on the thirtieth anniversary of her assault profits to Berkeley and the picture of her assault. What she discovers is life altering.