Published in 2023
304 pages
Brittany Means is a writer and editor living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A graduate of Iowa’s MFA Nonfiction Writing Program, Means has received several awards for her work, including the Magdalena Award and the Grace Paley Fellowship. Her other talents include doing horror movie screams and baking ugly but delicious cakes.
What is this book about?
Brittany Means’s childhood was filled with abuse, neglect, violence, and instability, in part caused by her and her mother’s nomadic existence. Poverty, sexual assault, and evangelical Christian culture didn’t help. Spending her childhood riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany’s life was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. With no money and only burned bridges behind her, Brittany took care of her younger brother, managed the instability of her home life, and attempted to make sense of the troublesome world around her.
As Brittany grew older, struggling through her own complicated relationships, she began to recognize that hell wasn’t only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the experience of her family, caught in a cycle of violence. While untangling the spider web of her most painful memories, Brittany crafts a harrowing tale of self-preservation with a unique narrative style that is part memoir and part modern-day feminist coming-of-age tale. The result is a masterpiece, a marvel, and a sparkling example of a woman’s ability to withstand the most horrific experiences ― and still thrive.
