That Summer: Healing from Sexual Trauma as a Nonlinear, Lifelong Process

The Thematic Claim: Healing as a Lifelong, Nonlinear Process in That Summer

In That Summer, Jennifer Weiner presents healing from sexual trauma not as a linear journey from victim to survivor, but as a lifelong, nonlinear process marked by setbacks, triggers, and small acts of reclamation. Diana Scalzi Carmody's arc—from a fifteen-year-old silenced by shame to a woman who builds a life, a marriage, and an artistic practice, and who ultimately confronts her rapist—demonstrates that recovery is never complete. It is a process of learning to live alongside trauma, of finding safe spaces and supportive relationships, and of slowly reclaiming one's own narrative. The novel refuses the tidy arc of a recovery story, instead showing that healing is a practice, not a destination.

The Immediate Aftermath: Silence and Dissociation

The novel's first sustained portrait of Diana after the assault shows a girl whose world has become, in her own perception, bleared and permanently corrupted. She can barely breathe, eat, or sleep. She dissociates in class, losing forty-five minutes at a time and having no memory of what her teachers said. Her grades slip, her clothes stop fitting, and everyone around her—her mother, her sisters, her teachers, her pediatrician—asks what is wrong. But Diana cannot tell them. When her sister Kara guesses that a boy broke her heart, Diana lets her believe it, thinking, It was, at least, a version of the truth.

This silence is not simply a failure of courage. It reflects the shame and self-blame that so often follow sexual assault. Diana tells herself she is a broken thing, ruined by her own stupidity and naive, trusting nature. The pediatrician's gentle observation that he does not like to see a girl's spark go out is what finally makes her cry—but even then, she cannot speak. She refuses the names of the psychologists he offers. The novel is clear that this refusal is not stubbornness but a form of self-protection: she believes there is no helping her, no fixing her.

This opening portrait establishes the nonlinear nature of healing. Diana's recovery does not begin with a decision to heal. It begins with survival—with getting through each day, each meal, each class—and with the slow, unacknowledged work of simply continuing to exist. The novel does not rush past this period or minimize its devastation. It lingers in the gray, grease-streaked world Diana inhabits, making clear that the first phase of healing is often just enduring.

First Disclosure: Telling Michael

Seven years pass before Diana tells anyone what happened. In her conversation with Michael Carmody, the man who will become her husband, she finally speaks the words aloud. The disclosure is halting and painful. She describes the three boys—one on top of her, one watching, one holding her down and laughing—and the sound of that laughter, which she says she hears in her nightmares. She tells him she was a virgin, that it hurt, that she hit one of the boys and ran. And she says, for the first time, the words I was raped.

Michael's response is crucial to the novel's understanding of healing. He does not minimize, question, or try to fix. He tells her she did nothing wrong, that nothing that happened is her fault. When she says she is trying to believe it, he says that for now she can know that he believes it, one hundred percent. He holds her, lets her cry, and then asks a question that reframes her future: What do you want to happen next?

This moment marks a turning point, but the novel is careful not to present it as a cure. Diana tells Michael she is not sure she can be with anyone. When she decides to try, she asks him to be patient, to take it slow. Their intimacy develops on her terms—she initiates, she leads, and Michael consistently lets her set the pace. This is healing as reclamation of agency, not as the achievement of a normal life. The novel shows that disclosure is not a single event but a process of testing whether the world can hold what she has to say.

The Long Middle: Building a Life Alongside Trauma

The chapters that follow show Diana building a life that accommodates her trauma rather than erasing it. She finds a therapist, Hazel, who specializes in survivors of sexual assault and teaches her grounding techniques—how to distinguish her emotion mind from her wise mind, how to reframe catastrophic thoughts, how to look for benign interpretations. She and Michael build a life on Cape Cod: gardening, kayaking, surf casting, baking. She begins painting and selling embellished oyster shells, and eventually becomes a recognized artist whose work explores the contradictions between tranquility and violence in nature.

But the novel refuses to romanticize this progress. Even decades later, Diana wakes from nightmares with the taste of peaches in her mouth and the sound of her hair swishing against sand. Sometimes she turns away from Michael in bed. Sometimes, during intimacy, she dissociates, floating above herself like a stranger watching from the ceiling. The sadness of the road not taken—the babies she never had, the college degree she never earned—descends like a crushing weight.

These passages make the novel's thematic claim explicit: healing is not a destination. It is a practice, a set of strategies for living with the past. Diana's art, her marriage, her cottage, her dog—these are not cures. They are anchors, ways of staying present when the past threatens to pull her under. The Cape Cod cottage, initially the site of her trauma (she worked for Dr. Levy nearby), becomes her sanctuary—the place where she builds a life with Michael, where she paints and gardens and finds peace.

The Reckoning: Confrontation and Its Costs

The novel's final movement complicates the idea that healing means moving on. When Diana discovers that Hal Shoemaker—the boy who raped her—has a wife and daughter, and that his brother Daniel was the boy who watched, she is pulled back into the past. The #MeToo movement and the Kavanaugh hearings have reopened old wounds. She watches the hearings paralyzed and wordless in her fury, thinking about all the men who harmed women and sailed on with their lives unimpaired.

Diana's decision to approach Daisy Shoemaker rather than confront Hal directly is itself a sign of how much she has learned. She is careful, deliberate, concerned about minimizing harm to Daisy and Beatrice. She creates a fake profile, seeds the ground, and waits. When she finally tells Daisy her story, and Daisy confronts Hal, Diana is not seeking revenge. She is seeking acknowledgment—a recognition that she was a real person, that what happened mattered.

But the novel does not offer easy catharsis. Hal dismisses Daisy's accusation. He never admits guilt. And earlier, Diana's confrontation with Brad—the boy who held her down and laughed—ends with Brad's suicide. Diana is left wondering whether she pushed a troubled, broken man over the edge, whether she has deprived his children of their father. The novel refuses to resolve this question. Healing, it suggests, can have costs that are not the survivor's fault but that she must nonetheless carry.

Symbols of Healing

The novel's symbols reinforce the theme of nonlinear, lifelong healing. The beach and sea, the setting of the assault, become the setting of Diana's recovery: she kayaks, surf casts, and walks the shore. The shell crafts she creates are a particularly resonant symbol: she takes something from the beach—the site of her violation—and transforms it into art, selling it to the summer people who once represented a world she could never enter. The white dress Diana wears the night of the assault, which she describes as ruined, is never recovered. But the novel suggests that what is lost cannot be restored; it can only be mourned and integrated into a life that continues.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel's treatment of healing is deliberately contradictory. Diana's recovery is real—she builds a life, a marriage, an artistic career—but it is also incomplete. She still dissociates during intimacy. She still wakes from nightmares. She still struggles with the question of whether she could have been someone else, lived a different life, if not for what happened.

The novel also complicates the idea that confrontation is healing. Brad's suicide leaves Diana with guilt, not closure. Hal's refusal to acknowledge what he did leaves her without the acknowledgment she sought. And yet, the novel suggests, the act of telling her story—to Michael, to Daisy, to herself—has its own value. Diana's decision to approach Daisy sideways, to protect Daisy and Beatrice from harm, shows that her healing has made her more thoughtful, more deliberate, more capable of holding complexity.

The coda offers a tentative image of continuation. Beatrice, the next generation, paddleboards across the bay. Diana teaches her crafts. Diana's husband teaches her surf casting. The family is rebuilding, not because the past has been resolved, but because life continues alongside it.

Study Questions

1. How does the novel use Diana's immediate aftermath to establish the nonlinear nature of healing?

Diana's world becomes bleared and gray; she dissociates in class, skips meals, and refuses help even when her pediatrician offers it. Her silence is presented not as weakness but as a survival strategy. The novel establishes that healing cannot begin until Diana can speak, and that speaking takes years.

1. What role does Michael play in Diana's healing, and how does the novel avoid presenting him as a savior?

Michael believes Diana without question, tells her it is not her fault, and lets her set the pace of their intimacy. He asks what she wants to happen next rather than telling her what to do. The novel shows him as a supportive presence, not a cure—Diana's healing remains her own work.

1. How do the symbols of the cottage, the beach, and the shell crafts reflect Diana's relationship to her trauma?

The cottage and beach are both the site of trauma and the site of recovery—Diana transforms them into places of safety and creativity. The shell crafts take something from the beach and turn it into art, symbolizing the reclamation of a place and a self that were violated.

1. How does the novel complicate the idea that confronting one's attacker brings closure?

Diana's confrontation with Brad ends with his suicide, leaving her with guilt and unanswered questions. Her confrontation with Hal through Daisy results in no acknowledgment from Hal. The novel suggests that healing is not dependent on the perpetrator's response; it is about the survivor's own agency in telling her story.

1. What does the coda suggest about the ongoing nature of healing?

The coda shows Diana and Daisy building a new life on Cape Cod—Diana cooking at The Abbey, teaching Beatrice crafts, Diana's husband teaching surf casting. The past is not resolved, but life continues. Beatrice, the next generation, represents the possibility of a different future, one where the reckoning with sexual violence is ongoing but not all-consuming.