'Lost Memory of Skin' by Russell Banks

If someone asked you to write sympathetically about a group of down-on-their-luck men, what would you think?

These are men who previously broke the law, were punished, and subsequently, have a criminal record.

Men whose friends and family members largely don’t have contact with them any more.

Men who have tried to make amends for their wrongdoings, have sought employment, a sense of order, safety and belonging, vowing to do better than they did before.

And yet, these men are homeless, forced to live underneath the causeway.

You might think – yes, of course I could muster some sympathy for these men. Heck, perhaps I could even write a story about them, to help others to understand how they got to that bad place they got to. The bad place that led to such a lack of present and future.

They're trying to rebuild their lives and move forward from their wrongdoing. Nobody gets to sit on the step forever, right?

Would it change how you feel about those men if I were to tell you that they had committed sexual offences?

Does that change how you think about them?

Would you still want to write about them?

And this is where Russell Banks steps in.

Not only that, he steps up to the table and fully embraces his authorial role.

Lost Memory of Skin is an epic and brave project.

Banks goes to places that nobody else want to visit. He tackles subject matter which would be easier to cast aside.

Banks writes about a community of homeless sex offenders, living under the causeway in South Florida.

But more than that, he explores the humanity of these men. Their misdemeanours are laid bare, as the narrative weaves together something of a story of how they came to be here - the most rejected in society. And also, what part society plays in that rejection, and perhaps, most importantly, how things could be different, and the impact that difference might have.

In researching the novel, Banks spent time living among a real life community of sex offenders, barred from living in mainstream society, in part due to impossible to overcome restrictions on where they can live, and therefore forced into homelessness.

The main character is known as the Kid. Named for the fact he's the youngest inhabitant of the camp. He was 21 at the time of his online offending, which escalated from a lifelong addiction to pornography. He has never had sex nor kissed anyone.

Now 22 years old, as a registered sex offender, he remains isolated from his hometown, his friends, and his family. Even his mum disowns him when he calls her from the police station after his arrest and explains that he had committed a crime of a sexual nature.

It's not just the Kid - the men living under the causeway all have assumed names. This is in part to escape the shame of their birth names being housed on the public register. A fact that means that they can never really move forward.

The Professor is an academic who arrives out of the blue, an outsider, or so it seems. He researches the community in an attempt to restore some order and dignity, and build some bridges from under the causeway back to mainstream society. The Professor has his own skeletons in the closet, however, which become apparent as the novel progresses.

There is of course a public sex offence register (with the novel being set in the USA) meaning that the men are forever identified.

I don't consider that things are different in the UK, because whilst public registration is not officially part of our process, the media and vigilante groups such as Database contribute to the fact that people with sexual convictions, and their families can't move forward.

‘Good!’ some people might say.

But if you actually stop and think about it, I mean really think about it- it makes no sense.

Ensuring that people with sexual convictions are jobless and homeless, with no self-respect, no self-esteem, and nothing of value to do, actually makes society far less safe.

Policy and procedure fuelled by anger and outrage will only ever result in… anger and outrage.

One thing that struck me reading this novel (which I have to admit, I found really hard to read), is how authentic it feels.

And how do I know? I wish I didn’t have to know. But I do.

My children’s father is a "sex offender".

I speak to a “sex offender” every day, several times on some days. I co-parent with him.

Our children love their dad, and they are able to spend time with him day and night, as they wish to. And they often do.

The majority of my friends these days are either married to or are the parents of or siblings of or adult children of men who are "sex offenders".

People I work with, people I am in contact with, people I socialise with - many of them are in this community, usually through the misdemeanours of someone else.

And believe me, there are thousands of us. Probably hundreds of thousands, maybe more.

The way in which this community is treated, is a direct result of the way that people who have committed sexual offences are treated.

And it's shitty.

This explains the reason why I have included a review of Lost Memory of Skin on my blog.

Anyone who associates with someone who has committed a sexual offence is persona non grata.

For the record, I have never met a single person in this community who isn’t appalled by their loved ones offending.

Not a single person.

For what it's worth, which probably isn't much, I have never met a single offender who isn’t appalled and ashamed by their own offending either.

My community is disgusted by the offending, horrified by it. Every person is shocked and devastated that the offences (especially online, open web offences) are at such epic levels, that so many victims suffer as a result, and even worse, that those victims are rarely found.

The internet and the promises and algorithms of Big Tech and Big Porn have played a part in facilitating so much offending. More than most people care to realise or comprehend.

Every person I have met in this community is united in wishing for these offences to be prevented, and for children to be truly protected.

Every one of us knows that the way to do this is not to isolate and demonise.

It is precisely because we care enough to want to make things better that we look for ways to support the most vilified, to ensure that reoffending is minimised, and that society is safer.

It’s not rocket science. And yet it seems that it is?

I have personal and ongoing experience of hatred.

Not only was I identified in the media by default, having to flee my home and leave my old life behind, not only did I have to leave my career, enduring a life of financial hardship with five children, forced to claim state benefits due to a lack of available childcare and paid work. I was forced to hide from my old life completely. Collateral damage to someone else's crime, and media and society's response to it.

The impact on my children has been even more devastating, as they had to leave their whole lives, friends, even family members on their dad's side who decided to step away. They had to endure parental imprisonment, media scandal, and to change their identity. All during a global pandemic and with no agency able to protect them from the true harms they faced. Which were not from their dad.

My children have been through so much and all I have ever wanted for them is to have stability in their lives again.

I have worked bloody hard to retrain and to launch two new businesses, all whilst balancing my children's and my own trauma and mental health, to try and get us back on our feet.

The night before I launched my writing website, I received an especially hateful communication. I won’t go into detail and give it any more oxygen, but I will say that that the way we are misunderstood and attacked as innocent family members is very real.

This brings me back to the reason that Lost Memory of Skin is a hard read for me.

It reminds me of things that have happened in my life, and in the lives of people that I know,

It's not an uncommon thing for men to be released from prison homeless. Nor to receive a community sentence and then not be 'allowed' to live at home with their family.

Many of these cases are in the fallout of committing online sexual offences, on the unregulated and wild west landscape of the open web.

This is not to minimise the severity of the offences, simply to express a sense of bewilderment that in all of the years that the internet has been in existence, it’s taken until now for the penny to drop with the powers that be, and for the guardrails to come down.

So, the hard thing about reading Lost Memory of Skin is not that it focuses on sex offenders.

The hard thing for me is that:

I know the truth that it speaks.

I don't live in America, where the novel is set. I live in the UK, but the reality here seems to be scarily accurate. Banks’ work carries a universal truth- that people who have committed sexual offences are not welcome in society. By default, as family members, we are left with a lingering feeling that we are somehow not welcome either, for daring to have a connection to a person.

Certainly, my children's father, who I remain supportive of, on account of the work he has done to become a better person, and to understand the impact of and causes of his offending, spent six months officially homeless on release from a 4-month prison sentence.

We had lost our family home in the fallout of court fees and due to media coverage, and he was left with nowhere to go. He was not 'allowed’ to sleep on a sofa in the garage of a relative's home that my children and I live in temporarily, behind a locked door, due to the reign of social services.

I should add, the reason I offered him the garage space was because my children and I live in an overcrowded house. There are six of us, to three bedrooms (one is a box room/ office). We used to live in a large detached house with room for everyone. That was the house we lost in the fallout of the Knock. Luckily a relatives house was available and my children and I narrowly avoided homelessness although we are technically squatting by the legal definition (because the relative is unaware that we live here).

As an aside, I was happy to offer my ex a sofa in the garage to sleep on because he had already been robustly assessed as not a risk to his children (‘nor’, as the report says ‘anyone else’s children’), and yet, I was forced to allow him to become homeless, or risk the wrath of SS and the threat of child protection or even worse.

So, my children had to endure yet another adverse childhood experience at the hands of the state- that of having a homeless parent. And again, nobody seemed to care.

Probation were no help. Nobody was. It fell to me to support my ex.

I could not have abandoned him, despite the sadistic thrill it might have given to social services, and indeed, the rest of society.

He was unable to help himself because he hadn't had his phone approved for Internet use on release from prison and was unable to look for somewhere to stay.

After much searching, I found an adult-only campsite, which police subsequently managed to get him evicted from after they turned up for a routine check and presumably the campsite owner hit Google and threw him out the next day.

So we found another adult-only campsite where he was able to stay for a few months until permanent accommodation was approved.

Although that dragged out because every property he tried to get was blocked by police for some vague reason. Until probation management from our old area stepped up and wrote a letter of complaint to police in our new area who seemed to be making up restrictions that didn't exist for him.

My ex was one of the lucky ones in comparison to Bank’s characters. And perhaps that makes it even harder to read. Thinking about the people who have nobody.

“But they should have thought about that before they did xyz” I hear the masses cry.

Well clearly, they didn’t, and it’s certainly not helpful to family members, who suffer great losses, nor to the rehabilitation of offenders, to frame things in this way.

Society doesn’t seem to be thinking in much more depth about how to solve the problems faced in the here and now. There are 900+ arrests per month for online sexual offending.

That’s quite a lot of people.

How can people who have committed sexual offences begin to rehabilitate; find jobs, housing, a connection to a community? Because they do actually need to, in order for society to function as it should.

Although it’s not surprising that these issues aren’t really on anyone’s agenda, apart from the hate-filled mob.

Even politicians offer simplistic, perhaps even stupefied contributions.

Suella Braverman, for example, thinks that taking tents away from the homeless might help to reduce the issue of homelessness.

If only she would take the time to read Banks.

My review of Lost Memory of Skin turned out completely differently from how I envisaged. I wanted to quote from the novel. So much. Because the writing just blew me away. I wouldn’t have been able to find the space for the quotes because in truth, it’s most of the book. Please do go and read it.

In the words of Carl Jung:

‘Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.’

Other things to read if this review interested you:

NY Times Book Review Lost Memory of Skin - By Russell Banks - Book Review - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

If you enjoyed this review, please check out my blog index here to access all of my blog posts.

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My name is Annie Hope. I am a writer with lived experience as a family member of someone who had the Knock. I am a professional writer, and I am able to work with your organisation, charity or with you as an individual in a variety of different ways. Please have a look at my website to find out more.

I also run a free writing group for family members of those who are convicted of sexual offences. You can find out more about the group here. You can find blog posts with free advice about writing and helpful tips in my main blog index here.

You can contact me by email anniehopewriter@gmail.com