Anderson starts the second section of the book with the first few lines from Speak. She acknowledges the murky boundaries between Speak’s protagonist, Melinda, and her own experience as a rape survivor: “Speak is a novel / rooted in facts, to be sure, / but a story bred with its own DNA / an invasive species growing out of a stump / of a tree hit by lightning / growing from the girl who survived” (168). While the novel is fictional, it is inherently intertwined with her own lived experience.

Although Anderson does not have high hopes for the novel, she is shocked to receive a nomination for the National Book Award. When attending the awards ceremony in New York City, Anderson feels out of place until she meets Walter Dean Myers, a fellow nominee and the acclaimed author of the young adult novel Monster. He makes her feel welcome in this new environment, cracking jokes during the award ceremony to calm her nerves. Both Anderson and Myers ended up losing.

At events to promote Speak, many attendees tell Anderson that they, too, are survivors of sexual assault and that they saw themselves in Melinda. These stories are often violent and graphic, and always told with shame.