No Means No: A Memoir About Trauma and Assault

"A real man would have fought back." A babysitter. A charismatic cousin from New York. A predator in a homeless shelter. A man who called his apartment the White House. Four men, four decades, one repeating lesson: acceptance always came with a price. R. Antonio Matta sat in therapy for thirty years without saying why. No Means No is the micro-memoir that finally breaks that silence-prose braided with poetry, written for male survivors still relitigating their own freezing, their own silence, their own bodies. This isn't a chronological account. It moves the way memory actually moves: circling, resurfacing, refusing to stay buried. Matta doesn't explain trauma from a safe distance-he lets you feel how it lives in a body that spent thirty years learning to disappear. Six chapters and a closing sequence of original poetry trace a line from a boyhood that was never protected to a manhood that finally stopped apologizing for surviving it. The sequel to Born Premature, Loved Overdue, this book is written for every man taught that a real one would have fought-and for the people who love him and have never known how to ask. Male sexual trauma remains one of the least spoken rooms in the recovery conversation. This book doesn't wait for permission to open that door. Unflinching about what happened. Careful about how it's told. No still means no.