‘Dark Chapter’: my rape, regrowth and recovery
Winnie M Li was violently assaulted in a Belfast park in 2008. Writing about it, she says, has helped her heal
Winnie M Li, author of soon-to-be published book ‘Dark Chapter’: “As an artist, it was more emotionally difficult to write about my own experience. That sense of helplessness and powerlessness has no shape as a life experience.”
Li (far left) with former US president and first lady Bill and Hillary Clinton and a group of fellow George Mitchell Scholars studying in Ireland
“Is it melodramatic to think of life like that – of a clean split struck straight down the breadth of your existence, severing your first twenty-nine years from all the years that come after? I look across that gap now, an unexpected rift in the contour of my life, and I long to shout across that ravine to the younger me who stands on the opposite edge, oblivious to what lies ahead. She is a distant speck. She seems lost from my perspective, but in her mind she thinks she knows where she’s going . . . she does not know who follows her; she is only thinking of the path ahead.” From the Prologue to Dark Chapter, by Winnie M Li