Hope And Safety

Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope, Amanda Nguyen, 2025

The same day Amanda Nguyen flew into space, grazing the edges of Earth’s atmosphere sixty-six miles up, I read her memoir while on a passenger jet, a comparatively lowly seven miles high. I wish I could say I looked out the window and imagined how much better her view must be. But my eyes were full of tears.

This is a powerful book.

No one who sits on top of a rocket and heads to space is unaware of the risk of death. But there is more than one way to kill someone, as Nguyen relates in her memoir.

You can kill their hope.

As a survivor of rape, Amanda Nguyen found her life brutally “redefined,” as she puts it. This book is one of the most powerful descriptions of the after-effects of sexual assault I have ever read. The sense that you must have made some wrong choice. The feeling that it is somehow your fault. I was propelled back to my first year in college, when women all around me shared stories and I understood, for the first time in my life, this was happening everywhere around me, all the time.

Nguyen was studying astrophysics at Harvard, having interned at NASA aged only eighteen, and looking forward to a bright future. Then she was assaulted.

She’d already dealt with enough pain for one lifetime. Nguyen grew up with a violent father, and a mother who would bargain with him to attempt to reduce the suffering – with no effect. She used education to escape. Finally, in college, with a restraining order against her father in place, she seemed safe.

Life changed in an instant.

Nguyen relates how tough it is for a survivor of rape to allow their body to be treated forensically as a crime scene. At a time when she wanted to shower, or at the least change clothes, she could not. And yet, it might all have been for nothing. Justice was never a guarantee – in fact, statistically, it was unlikely. The criminal justice system, she learned, can erase survivors from their own narratives. And she learned that if she did not immediately add her name to physical evidence of the crime – despite her wish to keep her horrific assault private – the evidence would be quickly destroyed.

In the short term, kindness saved her. Not dramatic, heroic action, but simple, small acts of kindness when she was able to receive them. She found that the effect of people trying to help, even when it had no immediate result, was cumulative.

In the long term, anger saved her. Anger was pain, and pain gave her power. Feeling betrayed by an indifferent, impersonal justice system, she turned the pain into the energy to fight.

Just as small acts of kindness can be much more effective than dramatic gestures, so Amanda reveals how changing the law is a series of slow nudges. The book offers keen insight into how Congress works. It’s an ever-shifting game of alliances and power-brokering. Doing the right thing seems a remote notion. Every step against an uncaring bureaucracy retraumatized her. Nevertheless, Amanda persisted. Then, she succeeded. The law she created is not a solution. It fixed one small part of a system that, as she lucidly relates, consistently lets women down while never getting to grips with the chronic drumbeat of violence against them.

Amanda Nguyen delayed her promising career to publicly fight to change the law. By flying into space, she’s firmly back on track.

And yet, there was a cavalcade of people trying to knock her flight down as a frivolous Girl’s Day Out.

It wasn’t.

Courage comes in many forms, many of them unlike the standard narratives of space explorers. Survivors of assault rarely get to feel safe again. Getting into a rocket and launching into space might be less of a leap into unknown feelings than most of us imagine. It’s a cruel irony that Amanda Nguyen was safer in space than she was on a college campus.

As I finished the book, still high in the air, I imagined the joy Amanda must have felt when she not only flew in space, but also knew in that moment she’d triumphed over all that had delayed her career path.

For those who maligned her and her flight that day, I can only say – read this book. If you don’t change your mind, even a little, you might be part of the problem.

Don’t be part of the problem.