On Grappling, On Naming: A Review
Micro Review of:
“On Promising Young Women (and the Nameless Men Who Get in Their Way)”
By Meg Pillow
Lit Hub
31 July 2025
Some years ago, a famous writer came to my university to give a talk. It was spring, and the event was in the university’s coliseum, which was packed on one side. The writer read a hilarious essay, and there was a Q&A after. I liked her writing—she wasn’t shy about exploring difficult things, like shame, the body, trauma, sexual violence. I was a baby writer then, and I wrote about similar topics. I’d been publishing here and there, mostly from a place of having felt silenced and wanting to be witnessed, but I hadn’t quite found my voice yet.
When it was time, I came to the microphone stand. I can’t remember now how I phrased my question, but I asked about naming trauma, about the difficult intersection of coming forward when someone who’d assaulted you was also a marginalized, nonwhite person. #MeToo was, at the time, still somewhat in the cultural forefront, and it wasn’t the asking itself that made me uncomfortable—I’d sort of made it clear I was asking for myself—but to ask with so many people looking, listening. I was a performing artist then, no stranger to putting words into a crowd. Ironic that what I’d wanted and hinted at but could never fully articulate in language disconcerted me. She was kind, the famous writer, and she spoke plainly about the difficulties in coming forward and the cultural reckonings we’d been seeing, especially around men of color. One thing she’d said stayed with me: “You betray no one by telling your story.”
This past July, I read an essay, one that also stayed with me: Meg Pillow’s “On Promising Young Women” in Lit Hub. The piece moves between the death of actress Lana Clarkson (and the lives of other women, such as Augusta Britt and Breonna Taylor), Pillow’s experience of childhood sexual abuse, and the archetype of what she calls the Promising Young Woman (coined after the 2020 film): “[T]he fierce rising star… whose life inevitably ends in ruin or death, typically at the hands of men.” The piece strikes a good balance between personal narrative and cultural criticism, not wholly one nor the other—and so, therefore, it must be an essay—and I’m taken by the use of inquiry throughout. Questions are effective at showing a persona grappling with a central conflict, especially as a point of critique and possibility. “What would it mean for women real and imagined to live without the weight of their abuse, without their unavoidable linkages to horrible men?” Pillow writes. “What kind of difficult, mundane, incredible lives would they live?”
It sounds counterintuitive, but I enjoyed this essay because I actually took question with some of its points, namely the above: How does one holistically address the patriarchal harm gender-marginalized people (I’m nonbinary and feminine; I have skin in this game) face without mentioning the people—men, people with names—who enable and largely enact it? It’s not as if abuse happens in a vacuum. How can we discuss Breonna Taylor’s murder without discussing America’s history of systemic, racialized police violence? (This is something Pillow’s essay doesn’t do, interestingly, given her acknowledgment that Promising Young Woman’s ending hinges on “the ridiculous white woman’s fantasy” that the police will get Cassie justice for her murder but not her friend.)
I get it though. Too often, women are relegated to the background of men’s lives; objects, at best. Whether Pillow’s essay “fails” on the foregoing questions is an academic point—too often, writers treat the essay as a place where all answers must be had, when the essay is actually a space for inquiry, grappling. That Pillow is clearly doing so is something I appreciate as both a reader and essayist. I appreciate, also, that she attempts a measure of care; she doesn’t parade the gory, sensationalized details of these women’s lives (the way cis men who’ve written about women largely have), and it’s honestly refreshing to see a writer not have all the answers.
I’ve said before that to give something a name is to also give it a story. Another point Pillow’s essay grapples with is the concept of naming, not just her abuser, but of the implications of the naming itself. “If I name him, I give him eternal life, and he will follow me forever,” the persona says in a therapy session. It’s why she refuses to name the men who killed Breonna Taylor, the man who groomed Augusta Britt, Lana Clarkson’s murderer. “What does your body say? What about your heart?” her therapist asks.
I stand by my earlier question around men and naming them, but I take Pillow’s point well. Naming trauma is a privilege. I think, often, about the women, femmes, and trans and nonbinary people who couldn’t, haven’t, and will never be able to speak up. I think about the evening of October 15th, 2017—the day #MeToo popped off—when I was being sexually harassed by a heckler at an open mic while my Facebook timeline was flooding, in real time, with stories from survivors. I think about the men, both queer and not, who came up to me after a survivor reading and wept. I think about the brown women in my family, who didn’t have a movement like #MeToo. I think about the women who were trapped with their abusive partners during quarantine in the COVID-19 pandemic. I think of Dolores Huerta, the weight of decades, and I—as I’m writing this—do that boulder-in-the-throat thing I always do. My body says grief. My body says shame.
The other thing is, there too was a man I loved who abused me. And where Pillow discloses that she confronted her abuser to no real avail, this was not the case for me. I tried to confront him and couldn’t. I’ve written this story, and that story, and that story too, repackaged from another angle, and stories about other men like this one. Like Pillow, I could tell the story here, on this page. I could replay the old tapes, slot them in the VCR of my memory. I could say his name. Their names. The famous writer was right—I betray no one by telling my story, but like Pillow, I refused to name him in those essays, the man I loved. But (un)like Pillow’s persona, who carries the exhaustion of telling the untold story and finally doing so, I carry the exhaustion of telling it so often, of my efforts to make meaning from my suffering. Everyone’s journey is different.
I’m not over it. I will not be over it. But I’ve learned some things about time and grace and repetition in the time since then, and I am, at least with this, out of things to grapple with. The abuse ruined me, but it did not invent me. I didn’t survive what happened to my body. I outlasted it. By saying there is nothing left for me to grapple with, I’m saying I’m done grappling with what happened to me. I’m saying I no longer long to be seen, not because being witnessed makes me uncomfortable, but because witnessing myself is a capacity I’ve tended to. Pillow’s piece ends with the assertion that “the real power isn’t in the naming” but rather “in being the one to tell the story,” and the essaying is clear: not just an attempt to divorce from the shadow violence casts over women’s lives, but to detach from the stories we box over ourselves.
Allow me the tiniest pushback though. I don’t think the power lies in one or the other. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive or opposed. I think it’s both. And so, then, I’ll place the story on my apartment balcony. I’ll place it in the coffee shop downstairs. I’ll place it during my weekends spent with friends, my lunches with my mom. I’ll place it in my bedroom with its neon signs. I’ll place it at my job, where I spent the bulk of my time writing this review-essay. I’ll place it on the flight back from AWP this year, from my altar in my bedroom. In some of these places, I’m dancing. In others, I’m napping on the couch. In others still, I’m writing; I’m laughing; it’s sunset; I’m out with loved ones. The man is so far away. Do you understand? I’m not surviving. I’m outlasting. Not in fragments but as a mosaic. Not trying to rewrite the story but merely trying to extend it. Not with a hopeful end but a faithful one.
And instead of naming the story as I usually have—within a narrative, within a specific word that connotes an act of violence, with his name, orbiting just out of frame—I’ll do it differently. I’ll gift the story the most “difficult, incredible, mundane” name I know, one I’ll never get tired of: My heart says Daniel. My heart says Daniel.
I feel like I could live forever.
Daniel Garcia (@iloveyoudaniel.bsky.social) is a writer, editor, and educator. Daniel’s essays appear in Guernica, Michigan Quarterly Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Poems appear in Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Ploughshares, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), and others. Daniel has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary, SmokeLong Quarterly, Carolyn Moore Writers House, Vermont Studio Center, and more. A recipient of the Denneny Award for Editorial Excellence, Daniel serves as the InteR/e/views Editor for Split Lip Magazine and the Micro Editor for The Offing. Daniel’s essays also appear as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays. Find Daniel at danielwritespoetry.com.
Meg Pillow (@megpillow.bsky.social) is a writer, editor, scholar, and Roxane Gay’s project manager. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature, Guernica, The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of Do The Work and lives in Kentucky with her children.