This is another book I ended up taking out from the library as a result of a podcast, and man. It's not the easiest of reads? It's a book about trauma, and how the specific lessons you learn about love as a child and teenager stay with you, and how to create a life within that, if not exactly in spite of it. It's not a trauma porn book; while some of the elements of her experiences are specified, a lot of it is referred to rather than laid out for the reader's perusal, which definitely shifts the emphasis away from being one of the standard mid-2000s memoirs that were all anyone (or me in any case) read for a while.
It's a book that feels challenging to me in a very 'well you just have to sit with this, you can't fix it even if you want to' way. The format is a series of essays, which could be read as individual pieces (and some of them were published that way), but for me the strength of the book is the cumulation of all of them. The weight of the last essay is built upon all of the rest. I'm glad that I read this book after I read Thanks for Waiting, because this is a book that doesn't have a neat narrative ending; this is a book about a woman who desperately wants a found family, and a soulmate, and to know how to have 'normal' emotional connections with people, and it doesn't end with her married and/or fixed. But it still ends in a place that leaves you with hope and a sense of possibility, rather than despair or a nice, pat narrative destination. I don't know. This book kind of fucked me up, and I'm glad I read it.
Grade: A
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