Read: 2026-07-04
Recommend: 8/10
The author is a great storyteller. However, I am not sure the claim that a 12-year-old was abused by a school teacher is true, since it was a piece of “recovered” memory under the influence of some drug.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. —adrienne rich
We’ve become more trauma-informed as a society, so we are getting better at seeing now that people with trauma are more susceptible to mental illness, chemical dependency, and other chronic health issues—even if they seem to be doing well. What we don’t always see is how the ambition of high-achieving people can be a trauma response. Sometimes the person who appears to have it together might actually need support.
There are two different but connected tracks: the work you do to process this for yourself and the external work you do in seeking justice. They both take time. Your first responsibility is to yourself. You have to take care of yourself, and the result of that work may be that others are helped, but first you have to address your own needs.
I was starting to realize that moving so quickly was how I’d avoided acknowledging what had happened to me. How could I have much to offer my sister emotionally if I was always on the run? For that matter, had I been emotionally available for anyone? I had always prioritized achievement, focusing on the way things looked from the outside and how people saw me. I’d never slowed down enough to think about how things felt.
I now understood why telling people felt so important to me, as excruciating as it was. I had kept this secret for so long, even denying it to myself, and the secrecy had made me sick. Talking about it was the remedy, the cure. It neutralized the shame. The only way to heal now was to speak out loud what had been done to me—to say it over and over again, as loud as I could, looking directly into someone else’s eyes. For so many years, these secrets, this truth, had lived inside me. Now I needed it outside of me. All those years, I’d had a tell. Now I needed to tell.
No matter how ugly the truth was, it was better to be able to examine it under the light than to keep it tucked away in the basement. I had spent so many years hiding that to bare it all was liberating, even as it hurt all of us.
All those forms of control that I’d learned growing up hadn’t kept me out of danger. I thought back to when I got my car for the first time and how free I felt, sailing down the open highway. Now I understood that I had mistaken control for freedom. The real way to keep my children safe wasn’t to control them. It was to have an honest relationship with them. That was how I could set myself—and them—free.
Over time, it had become so much easier for me to talk about what I’d experienced once I realized why I was talking about it. Saying it out loud was an active undoing of the self-betrayal of having denied it for so long. It was a gesture of unconditional love toward myself.
I could see that I had done what I always did: I pushed. The same way I had spent years pushing myself to the limit, whether it was how many miles I could run or how much I could pack into my calendar. I sought validation from outside myself when I wasn’t secure within myself. This was just another example.
This, I suddenly realized, was why I’d needed to tell the story. Life was so dissonant in its beauties and its horrors, so full of irreconcilable truths. Telling was a way to reconcile them. Telling allowed me to process, to keep going—to live. And in that moment, I felt profound, exquisite gratitude for all I had remembered, no matter how painful it had been to face. Remembering was so hard, but now I understood why we did it—why it was worth remembering at all. It wasn’t so we could wallow in the pain. It was so we could more fully touch the joy.