AFTERSHOCKS

A biracial multicultural writer grapples with the complex issues that have impacted her life.

Owusu opens her debut memoir with a vivid childhood memory from when she was living in Rome with her father, stepmother, and sister: a visit from her long-estranged mother on the same morning she heard about a catastrophic earthquake in Armenia that killed tens of thousands of people. The author’s father was Ghanaian, her mother Armenian American, and she makes an emotional connection between her complicated family and cultural dynamics and the fractures caused by earthquakes, the primary leitmotif of the narrative. “My mind has a seismometer inside it,” she writes. “Its job is translation and calibration.” As Owusu weaves back and forth through time and across multiple locations in Africa and Europe (her father worked for the U.N.), she movingly recounts impressionable, traumatic incidents from her past—most significantly, her father’s death one month before her 14th birthday. At 28, Owusu suffered an emotional breakdown and lingered for a week in her New York City apartment, confined to a blue chair she found on the street. Her painful memories filter through the prism of this episode as she reflects on her conflicting relationships with her mother and stepmother, who “introduced mysteries” about her father and the circumstances of his death. In alternating sections, the author shifts from her personal story to offer penetrating insights into the cultures and histories of the places she’s lived. Being raised in a variety of cultures, she writes, “made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us.” Though the prose is sometimes self-consciously stylistic and the earthquake metaphor strains by the end, this is still an impressive debut memoir.

An engrossing, occasionally overwrought memoir by a promising writer.