Myriam Gurba’s Mean is a memoir that refuses to sensationalize itself. It chronicles a lifetime of sexual violence, culminating in a rape by convicted murderer Tommy Jesse Martinez and its aftermath. Mean plods through the gory details of violence with measured banality, begging readers to put down their feigned outrage and instead proceed as they normally would, with the assured knowledge that misogyny will continue and that happenings like the assault on Gurba are routine. To quote Jenny Holzer, whose words have come in some part to define the #MeToo moment: “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” Mean wants us to settle in and feel the discomfort of our complicit behavior.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.” We have become cogs of violence, suggests Gurba. She compartmentalizes her descriptions with bad puns and clinical formality, the same way the United States has normalized misogyny. Think of President Trump, filling out endless health-care forms.

Early in Mean, Gurba describes her first experience of sexual misconduct at the hands of a classmate who reached under a desk to fondle her. She makes clear, however, that the systemic violence perpetrated is carried out not by her fellow student but instead by a teacher who witnessed the attack.

Mr. Hand, the teacher, fails not only Gurba but her young attacker as well, condoning his behavior with silence. Mean takes a hard look at how this country has treated victims of sexual violence and how collectively we have shamed them into inaction and steered them away from their own advocacy, demonstrating that consequences for attackers often fall entirely on the victim.

Myriam and I met about five years ago through our mutual friend the poet Raquel Gutiérrez. I had read Myriam’s work and been a silent fangirl from afar for some time, having seen her read at events around Los Angeles and in Long Beach, where she works as a high-school teacher. Onstage she is droll, sarcastic, irreverent, and almost always in poor taste. I’ve seen her make rape jokes and call vegetables her spirit animals, when she knows full well the term spirit animal is offensive. Myriam constantly leaves me aghast, but she also leaves me thinking about important issues on a deeper level. I think this is true for many people who stumble out of her readings confused and unsure of what they’ve just encountered.

Myriam and I...