SESSIONS

by Edward Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Wilson, a therapist, offers a memoir with fictional elements that details one family’s experience with emotional abuse.

The failure to confront an abusive past often takes a fearsome toll, as the author emphasizes in this account of his efforts to rebuild a relationship with his estranged daughter, Josie. She emerges in Wilson’s book as a victim of extreme emotional trauma, inflicted by three women: the author’s mother, her adoptive mother, “and another ex-wife of mine,” he observes, also noting that “Josie has, mostly unwittingly, replicated my mother’s and my ex-wives’ legacy of lies, slander, shunning, extortion and manipulation.” The end result is a story of misery, leading to a string of broken relationships with family members. It’s a psychic morass that the author feels powerless to resolve, and would rather avoid, until one of his granddaughters, Amanda, unexpectedly knocks on his door, seeking answers of her own. (Although the events in this book are real, Wilson asserts in a foreword that “the interactions with my interrogator are fictional, though I wish otherwise.”) A series of these sessions forms the essential core of the book, which finds the author falling back on his therapeutic experience. Doing so forces him to confront his own personal and parental failures, even as he wonders to his wife, Judy, if Amanda is “prepared for the shit storm she’s unleashing on herself, her sister and father.” It’s the sort of observation that only intra-familial manipulation and coercion breed, and the author coins a bittersweet twist on an old aphorism: “Fool or abuse me once, shame on you. Do it 1,743 times, shame on me.”

Even the simplest details aren’t free of pain, as Wilson recounts, explaining the ironies behind his choice of Josie’s name, inspired by a song that predated her birth (“Josie I won’t fail you, I won’t fail you”). One of the most wrenching moments occurs on a road trip with her, celebrating a potential career-boosting fellowship for the author. But what seems like an ideal bonding moment comes undone amid a helpless realization that he lacks the skill set to grow meaningfully closer to Josie: “For the first time I realized I hadn’t learned a single parenting skill from my parents. That’s a harsh discovery.” The realization unfolds, Socratic-style, via the extended dialogues between author and granddaughter as they try to gauge the toll that events have taken on their lives. It’s the type of storytelling that requires keen attention, and all the back-and-forth, at times, can be heavy going, but the book also has some succinct yet chillingly eloquent passages (“My mother abused her father continuously by the simple process of rendering him invisible”). More of these moments would have been welcome, but many readers will have experienced similar emotional challenges to those chronicled here, as the author attests: “Unhappily unaddressed trauma does not go away, it merely gets handed down.” This book offers a hopeful reminder of the truism about a past that can’t change, and a future that’s always unwritten.

An absorbing, dialogue-driven account of a struggle to deal with unresolved traumas.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR