REMEMBERING CHANGES EVERYTHING

A playwright recounts past abuse in this debut memoir.

Willow’s story begins in the mid-1980s, when she was in her mid-20s and living on Chicago’s North Side, trying to find her way as a self-described “smashed and broken” adult while working for her cocaine dealer. She drank and abused drugs as she searched for a way to leave Chicago and find a brighter future. The author, who’s called Hanna in the text, describes growing up with four siblings and being raised by a conservative, abusive, and racist father and a mother who had a “dark side” of her own. As an adult, Willow became a drug addict, haunted by memories of events that she found mysterious. Restless and unhappy, she traveled to Texas to rekindle a relationship with an ex-boyfriend, then embarked on a first marriage with another troubled man and raised a newborn. Overall, she writes of a life of searching; she knew she was unhappy, but she couldn’t pinpoint the origin of her sadness and unrest; as a result, she did everything she could to distract herself and “prevent a painful memory from popping open that amnesia drawer in my mind.” She says that she finally recovered buried memories with the aid of a therapist who diagnosed her with PTSD; specifically, she says that she recalled numerous incidents of sexual abuse; she also said she unearthed recollections of her family’s involvement in a witches’ coven. Although some of the events in this memoir feel haphazardly organized, Willow’s prose remains eloquent throughout even when describing raw, harrowing episodes of her father’s seething anger or a memory of learning about the coven’s ways in a “dark, earthen place made of rock, where faint, flickering light illuminated the floor, ceiling, and walls.” Throughout, the author reveals herself as a strong woman who’s unwilling to succumb to her past visions of a torturous past even as she accepts “the hand of the little girl, teenager, and new mother I once was and walk with her back in time.”

An earnest self-portrait of emotional catharsis through intense psychotherapy.