The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome authors Katherine Dykstra and Michelle Bowdler for a live-stream event as they present their new books, What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl (Dykstra), and Is Rape a Crime: A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto (Bowdler.)
This event is free and open to the public, with registration. Book sales are encouraged through the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.
A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives.
July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved.
Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life.
Captivating and expertly crafted from interviews with Paula’s family and friends, police reports, and on-the-scene investigation, What Happened to Paula is part true crime story, part memoir, a timely and powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.
About Is Rape a Crime?
She Said meets Lucky in Michelle Bowdler's provocative debut, telling the story of her rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society's most serious crimes goes largely uninvestigated.
The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone.
Award-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler's memoir indicts how sexual violence has been addressed for decades in our society, asking whether rape is a crime given that it is the least reported major felony, least successfully prosecuted, and fewer than 3% of reported rapes result in conviction. Cases are closed before they are investigated and DNA evidence sits for years untested and disregarded
Rape in this country is not treated as a crime of brutal violence but as a parlor game of he said / she said. It might be laughable if it didn’t work so much of the time.
Given all this, it seems fair to ask whether rape is actually a crime.
In 1984, the Boston Sexual Assault Unit was formed as a result of a series of break-ins and rapes that terrorized the city, of which Michelle’s own horrific rape was the last. Twenty years later, after a career of working with victims like herself, Michelle decides to find out what happened to her case and why she never heard from the police again after one brief interview. Is Rape a Crime? is an expert blend of memoir and cultural investigation, and Michelle's story is a rallying cry to reclaim our power and right our world.
About the Authors:
Katherine Dykstra is a writer, editor and teacher. Her essays have been published in The Washington Post, Crab Orchard Review, The Common, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Brain, Child, Poets and Writers, Real Simple and the Random House anthology 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers, among other places. She was recently named an "artist to watch" by Creative Capital for her work on the Paula Oberbroeckling story. She lives with her husband and two children.
Michelle Bowdler is the Executive Director of Health & Wellness at Tufts University and, after graduating from the Harvard School of Public Health, has worked on social justice issues related to rape for over a decade. Is Rape a Crime? is her first book. She is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and the MacDowell Colony. Michelle’s writing has been published in the New York Times and her essays “Eventually You Tell Your Kids” and “Babelogue” were nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
