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A Memoir of Loss, Escape, and Renewal

Memoir

Date Published: June 11, 2025

Publisher: Acorn Publishing

How does a young woman cope when she cannot speak the truth?

When nineteen-year-old Lenore experiences sexual assault while studying abroad in Italy, her entire world shifts. Survival becomes the focus of her daily life, physical illness grabs control of her body, and no one can free her from her pain. A ghost of herself, she takes the path of denial, believing it’s the only way to protect her loved ones and herself from her harsh reality.

On her journey toward peace, she assumes the expected roles of mother and wife, but a traumatic diagnosis puts her at a crossroads. She must start living the life she wants or roam her days as a victim in the chaos of fear. Lenore’s escape through travel allows her to reconcile the imprisonment she’s suffered over the years.

However, when another family tragedy strikes, Lenore understands she must finally come to terms with the silence she’s kept. But what if one incident that happened decades ago is too destructive, too deep to be excavated? Will she be able to find herself in the rubble? Or will she be lost forever?

800 words

Chapter 1: Innocence Adrift

I was nineteen years old and on my way to a palace.

Walking to school in my red leather boots with a broken heel, I pondered my life in Italy, entangled with emotional, sexual, and geographic complications. Running into the parishioners flowing into Perugia’s San Lorenzo Cathedral for morning Mass, I recalled how Mom and Dad had always found sustenance in their faith. Maybe I feel so sad because I never ask God for help.

Seeking solace, on an impulse, I entered the church to attend the service, though I’d be late for Italian class. Bundled up in a wool scarf and heavy coat, I entered the chilly and vast interior of the then 530-year-old Gothic cathedral under towering marble and stone arches. I joined other celebrants in a wooden pew and studied the massive altar inside a vaulted nave, illuminated by a morning sun pouring through stained-glass windows.

Within the magnificence, I muffled my gravelly coughs, got down on my knees, and began to pray. I begged God for help, please, and awaited my answer. Within the cavernous stone expanse, no answers came in the dim amid the worshippers' echoing voices. Why did my life turn out like this? All alone and living with a wound impossible to heal?

Hunched in the church’s frigid air, I decided to skip Mass and left for school.

Later that day, I wrote a letter home in my student pension room. I longed for more compassion from my parents, but I could never reveal the ugly turn my life had taken over the past two months. Instead, I wrote about my misconception that Perugia was like my hometown of Mill Valley, California. “There are dangers,” I wrote. I want to be able to recognize the dangers.”

I also noted, “I don't feel good, but I don't feel like giving up and coming back. There's too much to learn . . . about me or how I’d act in certain situations. I don't know whether this is clear or not. I hope you can see my meaning or what I've been through.”

No one wrote back for clarification.

But my younger sister, Grace, picked up on something between the lines. In her letter, she wrote, “From your last letter to Mom, your tone seemed depressed about something. What is really going on with you? I really would like to know, maybe I can help. Please tell me.”

I never answered her question. I could never write down the words anyway.

***

Two months earlier, I had arrived in Perugia to study, leaving home for the first time to attend the Università Per Stranieri or the University for Foreigners. The plan was to study Italian, art, and culture for a year.

Free at last, I was learning to fly. But I didn’t have wings.

I was excited and nervous after leaving home for the first time. After landing in this Umbrian hill town, frustration knocked me. I couldn’t speak enough Italian to navigate daily life. Snotty salesgirls rolled their eyes as I stammered and searched for the right words. In restaurants, waiters presented me with a horrific slab of liver or horsemeat, and my mouth twisted in disgust before gagging. I didn’t order that, did I?

Grabbing my dictionary, I began memorizing as many words as possible.

Every day, things scrambled out of order. After opening a detergent bottle, the smell told me I had wasted money on bleach. The laundry I hung outside my window to dry in the morning became soaked by afternoon rains. I fought with ancient, poorly hung Italian doors and confusing locks, feeling lost and incompetent in a beautiful place.

Italy the infuriating. Though unacclimated to living on my own, I could easily forgive my ancestral country as the afternoon sun burnished ornate buildings into gold, as I ate luscious food, rambled on cobblestone streets, or joined the townsfolk on traffic-free Corso Vannucci.

On my first day of class, I squeezed past Fiats parked with great anarchy along Via Ulissi Rocchi. Rubbing my eyes, I had awakened too early that September morning and couldn’t dress fast enough, my hands shaking with excitement.

Amid buzzing mopeds and the Italian language filling my ears, my new leather backpack banging against my back, I swung down the narrow passage. An espresso machine hissed in a nearby café, and my nose caught the intoxicating scent of a bakery.

I wanted to soak up every fabulous thing about my new Italian life. I marveled at the simplest details—a Fiat sign, a woman heaving her market basket, the bantering school kids. And I ached, wanting to share this beauty with everyone back home.

Suddenly, a car zoomed too close, threatening to rub me against a rough stone wall—an Alfa Romeo squad car driven by a policeman. As I spun out of his way, my head just missed two dead rabbits hanging on hooks outside a butcher shop—an advertisement for today’s fresh meat. I smiled and shrugged without a care.

593 Words

Chapter 35: Exploding Valencia

Abrupt explosions jolted us and rockets whistled past our heads. Amid the acrid scent of gunpowder mixed with fried churros, children threw sizzling firecrackers at our feet, giggling. Then came massive explosions that rocked the pavement under our feet as one hundred and ten pounds of gunpowder and four tons of dynamite vaporized in the central plaza.

Together with Rob, I reveled in this pyrotechnic chaos.

In Valencia, Spain, we had thrown ourselves into the weaponized silliness of the Las Fallas Festival, an anarchic celebration of creativity and rebirth. Once a pagan purification rite of spring, this madcap version of Burning Man had become a fusion of art, humor, and destruction. The trip had been Rob’s idea. “I want to see everything blow up,” he’d said, his enthusiasm infectious.

It was hard to argue with his excitement, though deep inside, I carried a different, heavier longing. I had toyed with the idea of returning to Perugia with Rob, yet stayed silent.

How could I explain to him my pull to the place where my life had shattered? Or explain what Perugia had taken from me?

The years had dulled the sharp edges of my past, but the loss remained, buried and unhealed. However, since my moment of clarity in Mill Valley almost two years ago, my life had flowed smoothly. My father’s exuberant love of life inspired me to seek joy and travel with Rob, embracing the world instead of running from it. Yet, Perugia lingered in the shadows of my soul, unresolved.

Las Fallas was a safer choice, I told myself—a wild, purging celebration far from what awaited in Italy. In Valencia’s old Roman quarter, we wandered among the fallas—garish caricatures of pop culture icons or fairy-tale characters, many two stories high. A fifty-foot Moses loomed over the central plaza, commenting on Spain’s banking crisis with a tablet emblazoned with the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’

Constructed of wood, cardboard, papier-mâché, and polystyrene, every falla was astonishingly flammable, stuffed with fireworks and gunpowder.

After four days of this insanity, at nightfall a fiery finale arrived; during La Cremà, or The Cremation, seven hundred fallas burned throughout the old quarter. As blazes sent a hellish glow into the sky, we dodged snaking fire hoses and waded through paper shards of exploded firecrackers. At one in the morning, we joined the crowds in the central plaza for the incendiary climax, detonating the bombs inside the giant Moses.

Men on ladders lit ropes laced with firecrackers, causing sparking explosions to race toward the giant falla. A swift hellfire soon engulfed Moses, his eyes glowing red as his insides burst into flames.

I climbed a light pole for a better view. From my perch, I yelled down to Rob, “I can feel the heat from up here.”

Spellbound, he never responded.

Flames started consuming licking at the tablet Moses held, inscribed with “Thou shalt not steal.” In the inferno’s warmth and illumination, it struck me: I still felt my overwhelming pull toward Perugia, a compulsion I couldn’t ignore. Stealing is wrong. And what Gul had stolen still smolders inside me.

My innocence.

My sense of safety.

My peace.

And the girl I used to be.

Going back felt both essential and unbearable. Like running into a firestorm—painful yet cleansing? Or like illuminating a way forward in my healing?

I was no longer the girl who left Italy all those years ago, shattered and scared.

Yet the echoes of my past still haunt me, whispering that my healing is incomplete.

About the Author

Award-winning travel writer Lenore Greiner grew up in Marin County where, at thirteen, she began her writing journey as a lifelong journal keeper.

At nineteen, her passion for adventure led her to Italy’s heart to study at the University for Foreigners in Perugia and immerse herself in the language and culture. There, the seeds of her memoir were sown.

Lenore has garnered eight prestigious Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing and was honored in Best American Travel Writing 2013, edited by Elizabeth Gilbert. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Fodor’s travel guides, and three volumes of Shaking the Tree, an annual anthology curated by the International Memoir Writers Association.

A graduate of UC Davis, Lenore married her college sweetheart, and they now call Southern California home. They share two kids, two kayaks, and too many rambunctious grandkids.

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