The best books about girls with traumatic backgrounds

I am endlessly grateful for, astounded by, my joy-filled life, given my history of childhood trauma. I have no doubt that the reasons I’ve done as well as I have is the healing philosophy put forth in Iron Legacy. Full disclosure: the author was my therapist for 30 years, until she retired. I wasn’t her guinea pig, and I certainly make no money from recommending her book. I just happened to be Donna’s client for 30 of the 50 years during which she developed the ideas that are the core of Iron Legacy.

The physical/emotional/spiritual path of the main character in my book is based on what I learned about family dysfunction by working with Donna.

Iron Legacy combines Donna’s short, personal essays and her self-help nonfiction in a way that deftly unpeels why adults living with childhood trauma behave the way we do. Why the addiction? Why the attraction to people who we know will hurt us? Why the inability to create boundaries with unhealthy people—including family? Why the depression and/or constant physical pain? Iron Legacy offers lots of truly life-changing exercises, but if you (like me) are not the kind of reader who actually does exercise from self-help books, simply reading the material does a world of good.

In the late 1980s, Laura Davis co-wrote The Courage to Heal. It was first non-academic book to straightforwardly confront the fact that incest even existed, let alone to address healing. The self-help book with personal stories gave rise to the movement that called us survivors; prior to The Courage to Heal, we were victims. The Courage to Heal led to recovery for millions of people around the world. I am one of them.

Fast-forward to today: Davis’ first memoir The Burning Light of Two Stars, traces her relationship with and love for her mother, who is in decline and still in denial about the abuse that Laura endured as a child.

There was no way I wasn’t going to read Burning Light. I couldn’t have been more satisfied. Davis—who has a long history of writing self-help nonfiction—does what few self-help writers can do: she can write. She can really write. This is one of those memoirs you should not start in the evening because it will be dawn before you know it—and you still have to go to work!

Lisa Williamson Rosenberg’s first novel is an original and outstanding exploration of the brutality in the lives of the people America enslaved as well as the enduring trauma from bondage faced by their present-day descendants. The plot is ingenious: the fantastic old Whittaker House in The Berkshires was a stop on The Underground Railroad. The ghosts of the freedom seekers who died while hiding there remain trapped in the house—children, adults, elders. Similarly, the contemporary Black women who visit are still weighed down by slavery’s legacy. Williamson Rosenberg does a remarkable job at entwining past and present, along with balancing narration from a huge cast of characters. She keeps the story clear even as she switches narrators, sometimes mid-scene. (To great effect.) Who can do that? Virginia Woolf and Lisa Williamson Rosenberg. Embers on the Wind is a unique vision of damage and redemption by a writer to watch.

This memoir is not merely the tale of a woman—married, a mother—who ditches her family to follow the abusive guru, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. That alone would have made for quite the saga. Instead, that woman’s daughter tells her own story, the one about the child abandoned again and again, as her mother can’t find the whatever-it-takes to leave the cult behind her. Ronit Plank writes without an ounce of self-pity. She lets the data speak for itself. 

Plant also goes into her relationship with her father, who played such a critical role in the neglect, showing the very real effect on a child of emotional abuse through negligence.

As a trauma survivor, I didn’t find the memoir triggering. Plank hits a great balance between necessary detail and consideration for her reader.

Once, I had the great luck to sit across from the editor who, in 1968, discovered Toni Morrison’s first novel, the now-classic The Bluest Eye. Alan Rinzler said that he felt as if the manuscript “opened” in his hands, showing a world publishing had never seen. Few at the time were interested in Black girls’ stories. When the slim book was published in 1970 it sold a mere 2,000 copies. It was not until Oprah championed it in 2000 that it sold 800,000.

In 1986, when I read The Bluest Eye, I was of course drawn to Pecola, the sad, poor, ugly girl whose father rapes her. I read the opening: first a paragraph from a Dick & Jane book. The next paragraph presents the same text but subtracts the spaces between the lines. The next graph takes out the spaces between the words, leaving a dense block of text that so simply yet so eloquently juxtaposes Pecola’s panic with the white life she sees all around her and the white girl she feels she is supposed to be. The dread an alarm in pushed to eleven by the sexual assault. 

In part because Morrison’s work insisted that abuse existed and needed to be addressed, when my life presented healing opportunities not available to Pecola, I was able to take them. 

By publishing The Bluest Eye in 1970, Morrison made people pay attention to black girls’ stories. I feel deep sadness that the novel remains so applicable today—in subject matter, yes, but more so because still too few readers are interested.