BookView Review

Caldwell chronicles a life shaped by instability, violence, and institutional failure in this memoir of survival. The book opens at a breaking point—a suicide attempt that frames the narrative’s central question: what does it mean to keep living when life has never been safe? From there, Caldwell moves backward into childhood, tracing how trauma accumulates through untreated mental illness, poverty, and generational abuse. Her schizophrenic and abusive mother, Marygold—herself shaped by sexual assault at the hands of Caldwell’s grandfather—emerges as both wounded and wounding. Caldwell resists easy villains, instead showing how love, illness, and cruelty can exist in the same body. 

Much of the memoir follows her movement through relatives’ homes, shelters, foster care, and social services. Each system arrives with promises of protection that rarely hold. The foster-care chapters are among the book’s darkest, showing how cruelty is repackaged as “care” and protected by systems more loyal to forms than to children. Childhood here is not wonder or play—it is strategy, a daily rehearsal of how to survive unseen. Education becomes her refuge. Reading and academic achievement give her a name other than “difficult” or “damaged.” But brilliance does not cure pain—it simply gives it sharper words. In adulthood, achievement and despair travel together, proof that the past does not disappear; it adapts. Caldwell writes with restraint and precision, choosing plain language over ornament. Memory does the heavy lifting, and the absence of ornament makes each scene feel sharper and more exposed. Lovers of trauma narratives grounded in lived reality will find much to savor in the book’s honesty and restraint.

A stark, unsentimental account of what endurance truly costs.

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