On the telephone, her mother replied with silence at first, then a suggestion that she speak with a school counselor, and finally followed by a startling question: "Did you have a good dinner?" Her decision to leave came after disappointing responses from her school counselor, her brother, and even her own mother after she'd explained to each of them what had been done to her on her second night of college.
The PCT starts on the border of the US and Mexico and extends 2,663 miles north through California, Oregon, and Washington, reaching its end at the border of the U.S. When Aspen finally realized that she couldn't shove her rape into a dark closet and forget about it forever, she dropped out of Colorado College and began hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). It makes the most sense in the aftermath of a trauma to try to carry on as if it never happened, as if you could-and then you realize that you can't."
"Turns out that it's actually an incredibly common reaction to want the boy who raped you to treat you well after, as if you could retroactively correct it," she says, "because to call a rape a rape-to name it what it is-is to acknowledge that something terrible has happened, that your life is forever changed, and that's a really terrifying thing to do. Since the release of both her New York Times essay and her memoir, Matis has heard from hundreds of girls who, like her, also asked their rapists to stay some of these girls wrote their rapists poems and love songs. Read More: Getting Coffee With the Man Who Sexually Assaulted Me I've got kind of an avoidant personality." "I'm just dreading returning to my email. She says her bookstore haul is a reaction to the chaos and to focusing all her attention on one book, her own, for the past two years. Girl in the Woods came out on September 8 and was, at the time of our interview, the number one new release in the Adventure Travel category on Amazon.
Matis seems a bit frazzled, probably due in part to lugging over $300 worth of books from Union Square to the West Village, but also due to the aftermath of releasing a new book that's doing very well. (Thankfully, she does.) She's also brought a pint of ice cream. She walks into the cafe carrying two Barnes & Noble bags loaded with three shelves' worth of books I hope she'll make it to the table before the book corners pierce through the plastic. I'm meeting Matis at French Roast, a cafe in the West Village, where she wrote some of her memoir. It's been six years since the assault Matis is now 25, and her memoir, called Girl in the Woods, came out last month to widespread critical acclaim. That column detailed Matis' reaction to her rape-she decided to hike from Mexico to Canada alone in hopes of overcoming her trauma-and eventually led to a book deal.
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