What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
Memoir. 352 Pages. 4 Stars
Synopsis:
By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.
Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.
In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.
Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.
My Review:
I have to preface this by stating there is some disturbing content in this one that some readers may want to be aware of before going into it. There is swearing and some graphic violence. It’s in the subtitle: the book is a memoir that covers a woman’s ongoing childhood trauma and her journey as an adult trying to pursue healing in the aftermath. The book deals with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, suicide as well as physical and emotional abuse.
There is an author’s note, but I know some (crazy) people skip those for some reason. But as the author says, yeah, it’s a rough read, but it’s worth it in the end and the book has a happy ending. Although the book does depict the darkness clearly, it never does it to be gratuitous. It felt like a very intentional balance of here are the facts, this is what happened and how it impacted the people involved, and acknowledging the grief while not wallowing or staying stuck in that darkness. The whole point of the book is that there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is hope for those who have walked hard roads.
With that said, my thoughts.
My sister’s roommate gave this book to my sister, who read it and then gifted me a copy and badgered me into reading it. As someone who has experienced ongoing childhood trauma and is dealing with the ramifications of that as an adult, I can completely understand why.
This was a fascinating memoir. It was very compelling and very hard to put down. Though our stories are different in many ways, there were some super eerie similarities. It was definitely emotionally difficult in some places, but hearing that you aren’t crazy and that you aren’t alone in this journey can be a great encouragement. So if you’ve walked through some hard, this may be one to consider.
Foo starts the book by showing us bits of her childhood to set the stage. Then she walks through the turning point in adulthood where she is diagnosed with C-PTSD and her reckoning with that. She has to learn what C-PTSD is, wrestle with the grieving process of what that means, and actively pursue healing.
I appreciated how she explained the terminology for the diagnoses and treatments, etc. in an easy-to-understand way. She looks at the science, the data, and the emotional side of things, and she does a good job of reminding readers that not all treatments work the same for all people.
I can’t say I agreed with Foo’s perspective on everything, but I didn’t expect to either. Her journey has been an interesting one and it was incredibly brave of her to share it. In the sharing, perhaps others can find hope or some direction or validation.
I enjoyed the read and would—cautiously and with many caveats—consider recommending it to others if it made sense.
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