Writing a bestseller is the new therapy for victims of serious crime - particularly women who break one of the last taboos by talking openly about being raped.
Trisha Meili needed no introduction last week. Her new book is simply called I Am the Central Park Jogger, and it is likely to top the US bestseller list within days.
While many people recall the 'wilding' attack of 1989, when the investment banker was dragged into a ravine in the New York park, raped, sodomised and beaten so badly she lost 80 per cent of her blood, her name and face were not known to the public.
Meili, who is now aged 42, emerged in front of television cameras and on the cover of her book last week, however, a petite, elegant woman with a scar on her cheek. 'I was damned if I was going to die,' she said. 'And I refuse to be ashamed.'
It is unlikely to be long before Hollywood immortalises her on film, with Cameron Diaz or Reese Witherspoon re-enacting the fateful run in the dark.
Ghostwriters and movie agents are already queueing outside the wooden house in the West Virginia woods where the wounded Iraqi war heroine, Private Jessica Lynch, and her family live.
In the US the stories of women who survive terrible ordeals are forming a new literary genre. US army Colonel Rhonda Cornum was taken prisoner when her helicopter was shot down during the 1991 Gulf war. She went on TV when Lynch was captured to tell how she was sexually abused by one of her captors. She avoided rape only because her attacker was unable to get her flying suit off over her badly broken arms and gunshot wounds. Instead he forced his hands inside her clothing.
Cornum refused to be crippled by the experience, and now trains others to withstand mistreatment and, like Meili, chose to write a book.
'There are plenty of success stories, and if people like me don't talk about it the only stories people hear are the bad ones,' Cornum said.
Author Alice Sebold has vehemently rejected the notion that writing about rape is therapeutic when she published her memoir, Lucky .
However, Beth Wareham, a director of Meili's publisher, Scribner, said: 'All memoirs are a form of therapy. More and more rape survivors are coming forward with a burning need to talk.'
Meili is giving most of her advance of $500,000 (£318,000) to anti-rape campaigners, hospitals and a jogging group which helped her recover.
She had to learn to talk and walk again after being in a coma for five weeks, but went back to work at her Wall Street bank and ran the New York marathon past the spot where she nearly died.
'I don't want to be a walking miracle. I am an ordinary person,' Meili said. 'But I wanted to let people know, particularly New Yorkers, but all the people around the world who sent me cards and flowers, that I am okay and their support was vital.'
