Speak

About Speak

Speak was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is Laurie Halse Anderson's first young adult novel. It is a first-person narration, told by Melinda Sordino across her entire freshman year of high school, in a voice that is observant, darkly funny, and marked by the specific quality of a person who has learned to say almost nothing about the thing that matters most.

At the end of the previous summer, at a party, Melinda was raped by Andy Evans, a senior. She called the police. The party scattered. Her classmates, not knowing why the cops came, blamed her for ruining the night and branded her a social wretch before the school year even began. When freshman year starts, she arrives already destroyed in the social hierarchy, having lost her best friend and her place in every circle she used to occupy. She stops speaking, more or less. She finds a closet in the school's back hallway, which she converts into a kind of shelter.

The novel's extraordinary achievement is that it withholds the rape — the central event of the story — for most of the book. Melinda knows; the reader slowly comes to understand; but the knowledge arrives in pieces, in the shape of Melinda's avoidance and her inability to form words around what happened to her. When the disclosure finally comes, it does so with the weight of everything the reader has built up around it.

Art and the Recovery of Voice

Melinda's art class, and her assigned subject — a tree, which she spends all year attempting and failing and beginning again — is the novel's central metaphor. The tree she cannot draw is the self she cannot speak. Trees root themselves in the earth even in winter; they survive being cut and grow new wood over the wound. By the end of the novel's final section, when Melinda has finally spoken — when she has said the word and named Andy Evans — she draws her tree. It is not complete. It is alive.

Speak was one of the early young adult novels to treat sexual assault with direct, unflinching honesty, and it became a reference point for how the genre could address experiences that were real in teenagers' lives but largely absent from literature written for them. Anderson has written extensively about the letters she receives from readers who found in Melinda's story the first language they had for their own experiences.

The novel was adapted into a 2004 film starring Kristen Stewart as Melinda. It has remained consistently in print for more than twenty-five years and appears on numerous lists of definitive YA novels.

Why Speak Has Been Banned

Speak has been banned or challenged in 52 school districts across 9 states, including Florida, Iowa, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The most common grounds for challenge are the sexual content — specifically the depiction of rape — and language.

In 2010, a Wesley Scroggins published an op-ed in Missouri characterizing Speak as "soft pornography" because of its rape scene — a characterization that generated significant public backlash and drew national attention to the book and to the difficulty that survivors face when their experiences are dismissed or distorted. Anderson responded publicly, pointing out that a novel depicting sexual assault as "soft pornography" was precisely the kind of thinking that made it harder for survivors to speak.

The irony at the center of the challenges to Speak is structural: the book is about the harm of silence and the courage required to name what happened. Banning the book — insisting that its content not be named in schools — is itself an enactment of exactly the silencing dynamic the novel depicts.