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?
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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This looks like a great read. Thanks for sharing.
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