NIGHTBIRD

Scott offers a memoir that explores the dynamics and repercussions of suicide and reflects on a history of trauma and troublesome choices.

The author was born in 1958, in the Inland Empire area of California at the edge of the Mojave Desert. She says that her hometown “smelled like exhaust and chorizo. The steel mill and freight trains belched black smoke into the sky.” She was her mother’s fourth child; the first three were almost two decades older than her and lived elsewhere. When Scott was born, her mother returned to work 10 days later and left her with her maternal grandparents. She was a lonely kid, she says, who was teased at school and always felt like she didn’t belong. Years later, she would discover that her family kept many secrets. Inspired by the rigid religious devotion of her Christian grandmother and Aunt Jane, she found comfort in an assortment of churches: At 13, she writes, “[She] regularly attended three different churches each week: a charismatic church on Saturday nights….the youth group at [her] childhood Baptist church on Wednesday evenings; and Sunday mornings at the Pentecostal Assembly of God.” It was at one of the latter gatherings that she met her first husband, who was 10 years older than she was. He told her that God intended for them to marry, and one year later, they tied the knot. Within five weeks, she was pregnant with their first child; they would go on to have two more. Her spouse was the breadwinner, and she settled into their home, determined to be a perfect wife and mother and to create the warm home environment she never had. Eventually, they moved to the lush Central Coast of California. However, her marriage to a cold, controlling, and judgmental man took its toll.

Scott effectively reveals how years of religious indoctrination—which taught her that God sees every sin and that Satan is always lurking—helped to push her into a depression. However, she also shows how she made major changes in her life. The author, who later became a psychotherapist and drug and domestic abuse counselor, begins her memoir with the most dramatically chilling section of the narrative: the moment in 2004 when she entered her house to find her second husband in the dining room, hanging by his neck. He died by suicide, which she saw as a final instance of his ongoing psychological abuse, and she writes of how it left her consumed with guilt. Overall, Scott is a tough and compelling storyteller, with plenty of engaging stories that she shares with sadness, self-effacing humor, and honesty. When she jumps back to her childhood and works her way forward to the opening climactic episode, she effectively draws connections between her early upbringing, her religious traumas, her feelings of unworthiness, and her endurance of her second husband’s behavior—and how her work with survivors of abuse and addiction gave her a close-up view of red flags that she was unable to identify in her own relationships.

A disturbing, poignant, informative, and ultimately triumphant remembrance.