Donna Freitas and Sarah Weinman: Wolves of Summer and Without Consent

Overview

A girl disappears from a Rhode Island beach community. A woman challenges the centuries-old legal assumption about marriage and sexual assault.

In two gripping books — one fiction, one true crime — Donna Freitas and Sarah Weinman explore the nature of violence against women and girls, and the cultures that allow it to hide in plain sight. They join us for a conversation about their new book, Freitas’s Wolves of Summer and Weinman’s Without Consent.

It’s July 1979 in Wolves of Summer, and 12-year-old Christina Grove has vanished from the seemingly idyllic beach town of Bonnet Shores. Neighbors from every corner of the community join the search, but as Christina’s sister and three other women begin asking questions of their own, a disturbing possibility emerges: the person responsible may be someone searching alongside them. Riveting and deeply atmospheric, Freitas’s novel is a story of lost childhood, female friendship, trauma, and redemption. In Without Consent, Weinman turns to history, investigating the landmark legal battle to make marital rape a crime and the real case that helped force a reckoning with the meaning of consent within marriage. Weinman traces the women, lawyers, and activists who challenged a deeply entrenched idea: that marriage itself constituted permanent consent. In doing so, she reveals how profoundly the law can shape whose experiences of violence are recognized — and whose are dismissed.

Together, Freitas and Weinman consider what happens when violence against women is obscured by the very communities and institutions meant to protect them. Join them for a conversation about consent, silence, complicity, and the power of storytelling to make visible what a culture has taught itself not to notice.

“Freitas addresses a topic little discussed in fiction with compassion, demonstrating the consequences of her characters’ choices while also delivering a fingernails-bitten-to-the-quick mystery.” — Sarah Weinman

“Weinman is the rare true-crime writer who rises above the genre’s inherent voyeurism to interrogate our moral, cultural and legal failings. A book that is years — decades — overdue.” — The New York Times