Rise After Silence, by Dr. Anne Aspler, fEMPOWER Publications, 2026
Review by Helen Kennedy
Anne Aspler had a remarkable childhood. She was sexually abused by her father at age five, resided with her fundamentalist Pentecostal mother who was living with schizophrenia, and taken into foster care. Her father was convicted and jailed for assaulting three women.
Nevertheless, Aspler managed to survive her early years, go on to completer her master’s at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases, intern at the World Health Organization in Geneva, get a Diploma in Tropical Medicine in Peru and complete a fellowship in Harvard before becoming an emergency physician, speaker, singer and brain health expert.
Rise After Silence: An ER Doctor and the Patients who Healed Her is a memoir that details her remarkable journey to overcome her ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) score through her interactions with her parents, her partner and her ER patients.
Aspler’s childhood experiences delayed the onset of adolescence. In a relationship with her supervisor, she declares that she is “finally living my teenage dream, just at age 26.” The experience, which ends, of course, in heartbreak, begins her journey toward adulthood.
One of the traumas she must overcome is her fundamentalist Christian upbringing in Edmonton. She admits that faith carried her through childhood; once into her medical training, she studies her “latest bible: Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine Manual.” Throughout the memoir, Aspler refers to additional substitute bibles, including Why Men Love Bitches as a secular dating manual, The Joy of Burnout when workaholic meets alcoholic, and The Six Stages of Parenthood upon the birth of her first daughter.
When visibly pregnant, a shopkeeper asks if she is reading What to Expect When you’re Expecting?” What Aspler is reading – The Story of Jane Doe: A Story about Rape and a series of rape culture classics as she tries to understand her father’s convictions. She knows she is having a daughter – “a girl with a vagina, a girl who will always be at risk in a world filled with people like my father.”
There is humour throughout, which relieves the intense pressure in conveying her childhood experiences.
After being dumped by her boyfriend, he drops into her yoga class. She notices him when in the Downward Dog position and runs out of the session. The motif of yoga picks up at the end of the book with a poignant moment as Aspler and her husband share a deeply unifying yoga session that symbolizes her growth and acceptance of her childhood trauma. The instructor’s final question, “how far can you reach?” suggests there is much more in Aspler’s life to accomplish.
But what are the answers?
Accompanying her father to an AA meeting, the repeated mantra she hears is “secrets make us sick.” Aspler’s breakthrough moment is the realization that once we know the secrets of our childhood, we must speak up, because “silence makes us sick.”
And speak up she does. From penning an editorial about the Blessings from Schizophrenia, to recording and launching an album dedicated to women who have been abused to becoming a much-respected speaker on Intimate Partner and Domestic Violence and brain health, Anne becomes an advocate for survivors and opens a dialogue on how to end violence against women.
One of the closing scenes is with her father, who had already given his daughter permission to write about his actions. After Aspler speaks at a community forum about her childhood, which her father watches on YouTube, he sends her a note demanding that she cease and desist. After a brief deliberation, buoyed by her growing awareness and need to speak up, she delivers a one-word answer: NO!
Her answer echoes the growing consensus of the survivor community, NO means NO and mirrors her own commitment to speak up and to end the silence about violence against women.
Rise After Silence will be published on October 6. Visit www.riseaftersilence.com for book release events across the country.
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