A Revisionist History of Loving Men

Lena Ziegler doesn’t know how to talk about love. In 2017, five years after she had been raped by a stranger on the morning after her twenty-third birthday, she came to a startling realization: three out of four of her serious relationships also involved rape that she had never acknowledged, or named, up until that point. She spent the next five years researching sexual violence and excavating the darkest parts of herself and her life to compose A Revisionist History of Loving Men, a personal and critical exploration of the sexual scripts that exist between women and men, and the normalization of sexual violence as a routine part of heterosexual relationships in the landscape of American rape culture. Braiding memoir, scholarly research, fragmented lyricism, and cultural commentary, this book is as much a reclamation of the self, as it is an invitation for all of us to reimagine what we consider “normal” when it comes to love and sex, and how easy it is to lose oneself along the borderlines.

Author Biography

Lena Ziegler is a multi-genre writer with a special interest in hybrid work. Her writing has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Indiana Review, Literary Orphans, Miracle Monocle, Duende, Dream Pop Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gambling the Aisle and others. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and press The Hunger. She holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Bowling Green State University. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband. You can find her online at www.lenaziegler.com.