“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.”

It sounded like a piece of refrigerator poetry suddenly ringing out in the wood-paneled Hart Senate Office Building: Christine Blasey Ford’s distinctive phrase describing her memory of being assaulted at 15 by Brett Kavanaugh, two years older, while his friend watched. (Kavanaugh, seeking confirmation to the Supreme Court, less poetically but “categorically and unequivocally” denied he had done any such thing, brandishing old calendars as an alibi.)

Published more than five years after her 2018 congressional testimony, Blasey Ford’s new memoir, “One Way Back,” is an important entry into the public record — a lucid if belated retort to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s 414-page, maddening memo on the investigation — but a prosaic one. A Big Book like this has become the final step in the dizzying if wearily familiar passage through the American media wringer: once called a “spin cycle,” now more like a clown car going through the wash tunnel.

Blasey Ford is a research psychologist, professor and devotee of surfing, who leans heavily on the sport as a metaphor for her ordeal. “You made me paddle out,” she tells her lawyers at one point, when they are advising her not to testify after weeks of preparation. “And you never, ever paddle back in once you’re out there. You catch the wave. You wipe out if you have to.”

She explains the difference between a beach break (“a quick, rough ride”) and a point break (“slow, unfurling”), and offers deep thoughts on kelp, the marine organism that can be both nuisance and nurturer to humans in the swells. (“The same thing that can move you back can also move you forward. I’d just have to hope for high tide.”) Coloring the underside of her hair blue to mark summer vacations from her teaching job, Blasey Ford even unwittingly presaged mermaidcore.

“One Way Back” — that is, to some sort of shore — is a story of swimming away from the Eastern power establishment and then being sucked inexorably anew into its undertow. Living in country-clubbish suburban Washington, D.C., but lacking college degrees, Blasey Ford’s parents vowed to give their three children premium educations.

Christine, the youngest, attended the all-girls Holton-Arms in Bethesda, Maryland, in social circles concentric with Kavanaugh, a student at the all-boys Georgetown Prep. She enjoyed reading “The Great Gatsby” as commentary on her circumstances, but even more “Mutiny on the Bounty,” which vividly rendered escape from a clear social hierarchy.

It was, she writes, “the height of an early ‘80s John Hughes era that glamorized a hypersexualized, debauched high school party scene as depicted in movies like ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Sixteen Candles,’” and it was in such a boys-will-be-boys milieu that she tells of being attacked, with no apparent avenue for recourse.

The assailant’s suffocating hand over her mouth, attempting to mute her screams, is one terrible detail that lingers; along with the bathing suit under her clothes that impeded their forcible removal. “Perhaps it’s kind of like my armor,” she writes of continuing to layer like this in her adult summers.

Blasey Ford never wavers from her certainty that it was the young Kavanaugh looming over her in that room, but she doesn’t seem hellbent on bringing him down. As she mulled going public, “If he’d come to me, really leveled with me, and said, ‘I don’t remember this happening, but it might have, and I’m so sorry,’ it might have been a significant, therapeutic moment for survivors in general,” she writes. “I might have wobbled a bit. I might have thought, ‘You know, he was a jackass in high school, but now he’s not.’”

Reading this narrative crowded with “teams” — high-powered lawyers, politicians, public-relations people and, yes, journalists, including a couple from this news organization — one indeed longs for and is denied such a quiet, human, adult scene of confrontation and forgiveness. (One also longs for more about Mark Judge, the buddy of Kavanaugh’s who Blasey Ford said was in the room that fateful night; he remained elusive in the proceedings despite talk of a subpoena, publishing “The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi” in 2022.)

Instead, we got a noisy, sped-up sequel to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas saga, with a similar conclusion: a man on the Supreme Court changing the law of the land, a woman from his past consigned to historical footnote.

Blasey Ford suffered from her testimony, forced to sequester in hotel rooms with her family, guarded by expensive security. After it’s over, there’s prolonged PTSD: hunkering down under a fuzzy gray blanket, unable for a while to return to her regular professional life. (“Twenty-five years does a lot,” Hill tells her, about getting back to normal.)

“It felt like a sentencing,” Blasey Ford writes of her moment in the floodlights. “I suppose this book is my way of breaking free,” she muses — yet the publicity for it will, of course, invite more abuse.

Although her signature phrase was mined for a McSweeneys anthology of #MeToo writings, Blasey Ford is not a poet, after all, but a scientist, and the mess of fact and fiction about her case rankled on a cellular level. “I could see it, the riptide where the truth and narrative were mixing, creating a building current,” she writes, persisting with the ocean conceit. “Overnight, the small but noticeable divide between truth and news turned into a gulf.”

To her credit, you never really feel you’re drowning, reading “One Way Back.” But boy do you long for a nice hot shower afterward.