🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕

Turning the final page on this literary memoir I find my head spinning, mind struggling to form an articulate, coherent summary beyond an overwhelming and incontrovertible — Wow.

So here we are – my own “fusion” of somewhat disconnected (utterly blown-away) impressions underlying this incredible work.

First, with sheer and absolute brilliance, this author can really, really write, — stringing words together into streams of such startling clarity and beauty that in many cases it simply took my breath away.

“I was learning that you can’t fill the void. You can only feed it.”

“I hung off his words, scanning the lake — its wide wet eye, an open wound on my right.”

No other medium comes close to a memoir with its potential to share first-hand a life, a heart, and a soul, and in so sharing reach an unparalleled richness of emotional connection with the reader. And no other memoir has affected me quite the way this particular work has. Absolutely superlative in its rawness, vulnerability, authenticity, openness and introspection — the author (with the finesse mentioned above) literally guts herself for the reader, achieving an end result that is really, truly, and quite incredibly, incandescent.

“He’d call me Mom in his sweet, squeaky voice and for a moment that would be all I’d want to be for him, forever. But moments like this are breathless, and one cannot live without air “.

Beginning with her torturous family dynamics, her emotional the author outlines her psychological devastation from a very young age, as her Iranian father entangles himself, deeply and abominably, — dictating values, threats, and misogynistically hideous “truths” from which the author could not possibly emerge unfractured.

“We all shatter differently, breaking away over time or all at once”

Equally challenged in her ability to emotionally connect with her white, British and also-struggling mother, the author never feels whole in an identity fragmented by layers of cultural conflict, misogyny, racism, emotional abuse, body dysmorphia, mental illness, substance abuse, and bullying.

“I didnt know of another way to deal with the hugeness of these pressing emotions.
All the hate, fear, frustration, longing and sadness”.

In penning this memoir, and confronting her truths, the author acknowledges, “There’s an atomic lightness that comes with seeing people and things for what they really are at their root”.

It’s clear that we (shattered humans, all) cannot help but experience this compelling work as primal and lovely, — in its telling a deeply and firmly-grounding confirmation of our shared humanity.

A great big thank you to the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. (Which also sports one of the loveliest cover-art images this reader has ever seen).

All thoughts presented are my own.