Shout

Anderson’s family moved while she was abroad, and her parents’ alcoholism has worsened. Anderson comes home to find her mother trying to break apart her bed frame, telling her daughter she and her father will need to sleep separately from now on and that he is going to Boston for an undetermined amount of time. She does not tell Anderson why. He returns nine months later, appearing to be somewhat sober, but tensions between the two parents remain high.

Anderson takes a job milking cows at a farm. She barely speaks to her father upon his return, saying “it hurt / so much to love my father that I prayed / for a heart of stone” (127). However, he still does loving acts for her sometimes, and she can’t stop caring about him. Anderson, her sister, and her mother bond over the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, in one of the few times she can recall them all enjoying a fantasy together. While Anderson enjoys her job on a farm, she gets a job at the mall at a store her mother manages. This experience propels her to apply to Onondaga Community College. She works hard with the intention of transferring to a four-year college, eventually leaving to attend Georgetown in Washington, DC. Her entire family moves her into her dorm, and she is surprised by how much it hurts to say goodbye to them all.

While at Georgetown, Anderson studies linguistics while working 25 hours per week. She makes friends with a wealthy classmate but quickly realizes she looks down on her. Anderson also recollects near-misses in which male professors used flattery to try and coerce her into sex. One of these men, a department director, denies Anderson a scholarship to study abroad in Peru.

Despite many obstacles, she earns her degree and marries one of her classmates. Her time at Georgetown is a struggle, but, as she notes, “I was in way over my head at Georgetown / but at least I knew how to swim” (148). After her college graduation, Anderson becomes a reporter. One day, she is assigned to report on a sexual assault case, which results in the assailant walking free despite his obvious guilt. Years later, she is horrified to see the accused walking around a mall while she is shopping with her daughters.

Around this time Anderson also becomes a mother and tries to write children’s books but encounters only rejection. Her attempts to write adult fiction and non-fiction are similarly thwarted. She begins to dream in Danish and finds herself confusing Danish and English again. In these dreams, an old woman repeatedly says the Danish word spor, meaning footprints or animal tracks: “maybe she is future me, that old dame” (158). These nightmares happen night after night around the time Anderson’s oldest daughter starts middle school. One night, Anderson awakes and begins to write in the voice of a mute, crying girl who she says “needed an interpreter” (158). She works on the book Speak for a year, and it is rejected from the first publisher she sends it to. Fully expecting the work to continually be rejected, Anderson tells her reader that instead of following dreams, they ought to “follow your nightmares instead” (160), since they helped her when writing her novel.