By Clea Simon

This is a measured book, harrowing at times but also thoroughly enjoyable. It’s a fun read about a rape trial.

Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President by E. Jean Carroll. St. Martin’s, 368 pp., $30

Laughter may be the best medicine, but it makes a pretty great defense too. Author and columnist E. Jean Carroll learned this the hard way: fighting her way out of a sexual assault.

“I laugh when I am nervous. I laugh in awkward social situations. I laugh to get other people to laugh. I laugh with babies…” She goes on. “I laugh to turn a guy off.”

This list — part of a much longer one — stands at the heart of Not My Type, Carroll’s funny, fast, and understandably furious account of her successful civil suit against Donald J. Trump for sexual assault. The above is her later, considered response to an actual question on the stand. Well, not so much a question as an accusation phrased as a request for clarification: “In fact,” asked Joe Tacopina, Trump’s muscle-man lawyer, “in response to this supposedly serious situation that you viewed as a fight, where you got physically hurt, it’s your story that you not only didn’t scream out, but you started laughing?”

“I don’t think I started laughing,” Carroll explains. “I was laughing going into the dressing room…. Laughing is a very good — I use the word ‘weapon’ — to calm a man down if he has any erotic intentions.”

Back in the present, Carroll lists the visceral responses all too familiar to survivors of assault: “Don’t make a scene. Don’t frighten him. This is just a mistake. This is just a joke. He’s just playing. This is stupid. This is nuts. Get it over with. Get him off. Don’t freak him out. Hahahaha! Don’t make a scene. Stay quiet. He’ll stop. If you scream, he’ll kill you.”

The trial, complete with transcripts and elaborations like the above, provides the framework for the book. But building on this, Carroll has also crafted a hilariously funny romp about the experience, a delightful read that manages to both follow the details of the case and touch on many of the social issues around it.

Made possible thanks to the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, the trial — like the 1996 attack at its heart — is serious business. But with laughter as her coping mechanism, Carroll doesn’t immediately acknowledge that.

The book opens with her being interrogated by Trump lawyer Alina Habba about the men she has “slept with.”  “I hate to ask you…” Habba begins disingenuously. It’s the kind of intrusive and irrelevant line of questioning rape survivors have long had to endure. Carroll, however, turns it on its head. While her answers to the lawyer are straightforward and short, to us, the reader, she goes into delicious diversions, both about the men in her life and her defense team — prepping us for the ordeal to come.

That prep necessitates toning down her joie de vivre. For example, her team drills into her, she has to stop saying “I’m fabulous,” when asked how she is. In truth, that insouciance is masking much deeper hurt. Only after extensive interviews with Dr. Leslie Leibowitz, the trauma expert who created the Sexual Assault Response protocol for the US Air Force, does she admit the truth to herself.

“I flirted with Trump. The flirting led to the assault. I blame myself.” It gets worse: “And because I blame myself for the assault, I never flirt with an eligible man again.… I shut down any chance of sparking a romance, and for the next twenty-eight years I miss out on the romps, the sweetness, the tenderness, the delicacy, and the wild erotic pleasures of being with a man.”

It’s a devastating realization, particularly for such a seemingly devil-may-care woman, the successor of a self-described “boy crazy” girl, and drives home the gravity of the trial.

And what a trial it is: Woven into the transcripts and the digressions sits you-are-there reporting on the extensive prep. Early mock juries, for example, are not able to envision Carroll as a woman Trump would want to rape, a sexist and ageist assumption her team must counter. After tracking down a beloved stylist, another amusing adventure, she bobs and colors her hair.  “And, no, I do not look like I looked in 1996, but I look like somebody who could have once looked like I looked in 1996.”

Even as she readies herself, you can hear her fighting back. “Why does nobody ask what Trump is wearing?” she asks.

Her team cannot take the stand for her, however, and the questioning (particularly by “[b]ig-necked, big-shouldered, hair-oiled, and handsome” Tacopina) is brutal. “It is a surreal feeling being beat up by a man who is asking me to describe being beat up and assaulted by the man he is beating me up to defend,” Carroll writes.

Along the way, she gives us reminiscences about dropping acid with Hunter S. Thompson, writing (badly) for Saturday Night Live, and plenty of hanging with famous, formidable women from Kathy Griffin to Fran Lebowitz (whom Carroll took camping).

She also gives us breaks from the trial, recalling friendships and romances, noting at one point “because this memoir is about a trial against a not-nice man … every once in a while I must give myself a treat.”

The result is a measured book, harrowing at times but also thoroughly enjoyable. It’s a fun read about a rape trial.

Ultimately, of course, this book is about so much more than the trial. It is about surviving. Because for E. Jean Carroll, laughter is not simply a coping mechanism, it is a cri de coeur. Laughter for Carroll, as this glorious book makes clear, is about life.

Clea Simon is the Somerville-based author most recently of the novel The Butterfly Trap.