Debut novel examines the lasting impact of sexual assault

In 2015, when Melissa Connelly began work on the initial draft of her debut novel, What Was Lost, the #MeToo movement had yet to gain national momentum. Issues concerning sexual abuse and misconduct remained largely unaddressed.

In many ways, this silence was reminiscent of the author’s own childhood in the 1970s — one of two periods she explores in her debut novel, which came out last fall.

What Was Lost tells the story of Marti Farrell — both as a young teen navigating sexual abuse in the 1970s and later as an adult still coping with the trauma of her past.

“I wanted to do it in two timelines to show the effect of the sexual abuse — how it affects [the survivor] through life, how it affects an adult woman, how it affects her parenting,” Connelly says.

Shame and guilt

As a teen, Marti is a trusting, creative 14-year-old girl with a lonely home life. Because of this, she revels in the special attention from her high school’s “cool” art teacher, Spencer Douglas. He shares wine and marijuana with Marti and her friends, and he exposes them to artwork, books and music. His nicknames, gifts and touchy-feely behavior (what an adult reader recognizes as a sexual predator grooming his victim) makes Marti feel desirable, powerful and special.

“She thinks she’s an equal in this relationship,” Connelly says. “It took her many years to really process the whole thing. [Marti] felt a lot of guilt about it, a lot of shame, because she felt like she created the situation.”

Over the past decade, as Connelly worked on the book, college campuses grappled with confronting sexual assault as the #MeToo movement spread worldwide. Such conversations were not available to Connelly and her friends growing up. In discussing her work with Xpress, Connelly describes some of her high school classmates being targeted by male authority figures and sexually abused. To her knowledge, this behavior wasn’t reported to law enforcement or publicly known.

“It just wasn’t talked about then at all,” Connelly explains. “Even bits of it we were aware of, you didn’t even process it as sexual violence. It was all about blaming the victim.” She recalls Oprah Winfrey discussing her own childhood sexual abuse on her television show in the 1980s as a turning point that greatly increased societal awareness and galvanized a response.

In the novel, however, Marti’s trauma remains a secret long into adulthood. The story’s other time period follows the character as a divorced, 40-year-old mother, co-parenting her 14-year-old daughter, Tess, who is beginning to show an interest in boys. Marti struggles to trust her daughter’s judgment. Additionally, the novel’s protagonist grapples with her own decision over whether or not to tell Tess about her own experience of sexual abuse.

Over the course of several weeks, Marti realizes how the secret has negatively impacted her relationships. In response, she decides to track down Spencer Douglas.

Similarities and differences

Throughout the book, Connelly touches on other hot-button themes, such as emotionally neglectful parents, closeted homosexuality and slut-shaming. But pregnancy termination may be the book’s topic that is most relevant in 2025.

“I never expected Roe v. Wade being overturned and how significant that would be in terms of my book,” Connelly explains. “It’s interesting now that this is a story of what it was like before Roe and that we’re living the aftermath of it.”

In What Was Lost, the young Marti does not know how to access the health procedure or the number of laws in place that restrict her ability to get one as a minor. At the time of the story, abortion is illegal in the character’s home state of Vermont, forcing her to hitchhike to New York.

Connelly believes her lifelong experience working with young people in psychiatric nursing and special education helped her channel Marti’s teenage perspective. She is quick to point out, however, that Marti’s story does not reflect her own. The only similarity, she says, is that both left home at an early age. After leaving New York, Connelly attended a high school on a commune in Vermont. She insists that because it was the 1970s, this decision was not all that unorthodox. (Still, she says with a chuckle, the experience “could be” its own novel. “There were a lot of hard years between 16 and 20, when I finally went to college.”)

Life in Brevard

Connelly is based in Brooklyn most of the year. (Former New York City first lady Chirlane McCray, a neighbor and friend, blurbed her book.) But since retiring in August, the author says she anticipates longer visits to her home in Brevard. Her parents, she notes, first moved to the area in the 1980s.

She’s also working on a second novel, which will be told from multiple points of view.

“That one is harder for me to write, because it’s more autobiographical,” Connelly says. “It’s about a family where the father dies very suddenly when the children are still young.”

Connelly’s own journey as a writer, she notes, has been unconventional. She was in her late 40s when she began What Was Lost. Ten years later, she’s thrilled to see it published. “If you told my 22-year-old self it would have taken me that long, I’d have been horrified,” she says with a laugh. “But I am here. I did it!”