UNSHATTERED

Dissociative Identity Disorder, domestic violence, addiction, and suicide rend an American family in this plangent memoir.

Churchman recalls growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in suburban Washington, D. C., with three younger brothers and profoundly troubled parents. Per the author, her mother, Debby (who was molested by her own mother) developed dozens of alternate personalities, some known only by a number. They included Five, a 5-year-old who loved to play with crayons; Anna, a blasé, chain-smoking teenager with an English accent who supervised the other personalities; and Tony, a man who was flummoxed by finding himself in women’s clothing. Debby’s personality swerves led to depression, suicide attempts, and frequent stints in the psych ward. Churchman writes that her father, Don, was an alcoholic who beat her mother and her brother Bryce and left the family when the author was 14. Bryce became a drug addict who set his bed on fire with a crack pipe and first overdosed at the age of 12; Churchman’s brother Alex started making suicide threats at the age of 6. The author reports that she was molested by her grandmother as a toddler and sexually groped by a great-uncle at the age of 13, but she had to become parent to the family—cooking and cleaning, managing Debby’s illness, and dutifully holding the household together. Later chapters cover her escape to college and eventual career as a psychic medium, shaman and spiritual adviser to business executives. Churchman’s portrait of her embattled family is as intense as a Eugene O’Neill tragedy, but it ends in hope as she takes charge of her life and marries a man whom she trusts to care for her. She tells the tale in darkly lyrical, novelistic prose. (At her grandmother’s funeral, her family “commandeered the room like a troupe of desperate performers, their voices rising and falling in a violent symphony of grief and gin.”) The result is a moving confessional memoir that gleans hard-won wisdom from excruciating pain.

A harrowing, beautifully written saga of family breakdown and redemption.