Review: Don’t Let It Break You, Honey by Jenny Evans

Jenny Evans’s Don’t let it break you, darlingJoe, who is longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, begins with that violent experience as a young actor. Nearly three decades later, Evans returns to that moment in her memoir that in turn asks a set of larger questions: What happens when a private experience becomes public property? How do institutions like the press and the police shape a survivor’s story? And how can one assert control over a narrative that has already circulated beyond one’s control?

Stories of sexual violence place a strange demand on those who tell them. Survivors are expected to create credible stories. Yet, trauma rarely behaves that way. Memory often breaks down and language struggles to capture what happened. Scholars writing about trauma point to this paradox where survivors must tell their stories in ways that seem coherent, even if the experience itself is not.

When Evans writes about that period of her life, she often places the attack within a longer history of loss. His childhood was stable and loving. His mother worked as a physician and his father taught English and worked as a labor counselor. He took Evans and his brother on long walks where they watched birds and recited poems. These memories appear in the book as an almost lost language of security. When Evans was 13, that world came crashing down. His father died after a routine medical procedure went wrong. The shock of that loss disrupted his adolescence.

Going to school became difficult and he dropped out twice. Grief becomes one of the most powerful forces shaping the memoir. Evans writes about how the death of a parent alters a young person’s sense of stability. Years later, another devastating loss would come and completely disrupt his life. The accumulation of these events helps Evans write about violence with an awareness that life can change suddenly and without warning.

After leaving school she eventually found a sense of belonging in youth theatre, which led to her being cast in Twin Town. For a moment, it seemed that life had found direction again. That short-term momentum makes the events that follow even more disorienting. This attack appears in the memoir with clarity and uncertainty at the same time. Evans remembers its physical force, particularly the pressure on his throat which left him with difficulty breathing. At the same time, she admits that she never fully understood what happened in those moments. Trauma leaves gaps. “It was an attack by penetration,” she writes. “The truth is, I don’t know what the penetration was.”

Rather than report the assault, Evans retreated into a cycle of shame and self-blame. She always considered herself confident and independent. The attack shattered that self-image. She writes, “I couldn’t read rooms. I couldn’t trust my conscience.” She left Wales for London and gave up acting. Within a year she gained weight, changed the way she dressed and retreated from the life she had imagined.

One of the most remarkable things in the book is the role of storytelling. There is a certain “literary evidence” that exposes structural injustice. The memoir runs parallel to the major crisis in British journalism that culminated in the phone-hacking scandal. As Evans examines the media culture surrounding her own assault case, her personal experience becomes an entry point into a broader critique of how the tabloid press gathers and disseminates information.

Evans doesn’t try to present herself as heroic or resilient. She writes about her confusion, depression, and the slow erosion of self-confidence. A year after the attack, the manager of the bar where she worked raped her again. This incident confirmed her worst fear: that something about herself made her vulnerable to harm. He did not even report this attack.

What emerges from these chapters is an examination of shame as a social force. Evans argues that shame plays a central role in how sexual violence is silenced. Survivors often internalize the idea that repeated victimization makes their story less credible. In one of the memoir’s most devastating lines, she writes: “One attack is bad luck, two is recklessness – the context doesn’t matter – three, or more, now you’re an unquenchable, fantasizing, crazy slut.”

Years later, Evans began to rebuild his life. She enrolled at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama with the intention of becoming a teacher. For the first time since the attack she felt she had direction again. Then he encountered a newspaper article that changed everything. The man who assaulted her was charged with rape.

Until that moment, Evans believed that the attack on him may have been an isolated incident. Suddenly another possibility emerged. Perhaps other women were harmed. Perhaps silence had saved the criminal. She went to the police. The subsequent experience becomes the main argument of the memoir. Evans hoped the criminal justice system would clarify what had happened. Instead, he saw his story slip into the media machinery. Within four days of speaking to police, details of his confidential statement were revealed in the Sun. The article did not mention her by name, but it identified the man she accused and reproduced intimate details of his testimony. Evans was stunned. The information she had shared in confidence had somehow made its way from the police interview room to the tabloid newsroom.

This experience changed the way I understood journalism. Evans describes this moment as the beginning of an intellectual transformation. He stopped thinking of his experience solely as a personal trauma and began to see it as part of a larger media system. Tabloids thrive on personal information. Stories about sex, violence and celebrity generate attention and profits. Within that economy, the suffering of individuals becomes a valuable commodity. This realization inspired Evans to pursue journalism and he enrolled in a journalism school. She wanted to understand the machinery that had turned her experience into news. Journalism became a way to investigate a story that had gotten out of his control. During his studies at City University, he attended a masterclass with Guardian reporter Nick Davies, researching what would become flat earth newsHis historical criticism of British journalism. Evans contacted him directly and asked for work. Soon she was assisting him with his research into newsroom practices. At the same time, he helped expose a widespread culture of phone hacking and media corruption that ultimately led to the closure of the News of the World and the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics.

This memoir considers journalism as a form of knowledge production. This also created an interesting intersection of professional work and personal life. His journalism career is driven by personal urgency. This gives the memoir its distinctive voice. Evans writes from multiple positions at the same time. She is simultaneously a survivor, reporter, researcher, witness. As she moves on from these roles, her perspective changes. Sometimes, she investigates the culture of British tabloids as a journalist. At other moments, she’s also dealing with memory and grief.

The stories he heard confirmed his growing suspicion of the tabloid press. Reporters described abusive “punishment assignments” given by editors, the use of private investigators to obtain confidential information, and payments to police officers for tips. The industry ran on pressure, secrecy and competition.

Gradually, Evans began to see his own experience within this system. This question had been troubling him ever since the newspaper article appeared: “How did they know?” It now appears to be linked to a much larger network of connections between journalists and the police. The phone-hacking scandal eventually exposed many of these practices. As Evans worked with Davis, the scale of the problem gradually emerged. For Evans, the scandal revealed that the line between law enforcement and journalism had become dangerously blurred. Within that framework his own case began to make sense. Only a few people were aware of the confidential details printed in the tabloids. Evans herself, her friend Rachel and the police.

The memoir is a long battle for answers. Evans lodged complaints and eventually took legal action against the Metropolitan Police with the help of lawyer Tamsin Allen. This process took years. It appears that institutional responses were often designed to diffuse responsibility rather than deflect it. Evans also makes a structural decision that changes the way the memoir is read. The name of the person who attacked him remains unnamed throughout the text and appears only as a “well-known person”. It’s disappointing and makes one think more about the networks of media, celebrity, and institutional power that allowed the story to circulate this way.

The title of the memoir comes from a brief meeting with American author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, who told Evans, “Don’t let this break you, darling.” It felt like a prophecy. Then life continued through a series of decisions and a lot of perseverance, which Evans gained from that one meeting with Angelo.

Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.