On January 14, 1970, 10 weeks after my 13th birthday, I was sexually molested by an uncle— “broken in” by the patriarchy, as I put it in my poem “A Root.” Instructed not to talk about it, I plummeted overnight into a strange new identity as a silenced sexual being. While Donald Trump was making his name in New York in the mid-1970s, I was there too. I accompanied my big sister on double-dates in Manhattan with wealthy guys twice our age and partied with my best friend in another wealthy guy’s pad in Fort Lauderdale.
Now, it’s a little hard to understand why I did these things, except that I could. At that age in the climate of that time and place, in the gap year before starting my freshman year as one of the first women at Yale, I embraced the role of sexual object. It felt far easier to take on the role of what Ghislaine Maxwell would call a “nubile “than not. I had been born, raised, and groomed for it, after all, at least as
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