Reviews - What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

6.88k reviews for:

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo

4.6 AVERAGE

beccamorte's review

5.0

dark emotional funny hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

aspen_meets_world's review against another edition

4.0

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

gabby155's review against another edition

4.75

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Best book I’ve ever read on PTSD hands down. What Stephanie Foo has endured is truly inspiring but her journey to accepting herself, her struggle with therapy, and the light she sheds on the Asian American culture as it relates to mental health is just captivating. I specifically loved the recordings she composed between her and Dr. Ham. Honestly, this book just reinforces my desire to go into psychiatric medicine. It was both fascinating and enlightening.

indiology's review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional informative slow-paced

tjain's review

5.0

amazing and so insightful but definitely quite a few tws

thatokiebird's review against another edition

4.0

dark emotional informative tense medium-paced

The first two hours of this ten hour audiobook is full memoir, recounting the author’s devastating childhood with physically and verbally abusive parents who both abandoned her before her junior year of high school. This is incredibly hard to read, and that’s coming from someone who reads memoirs frequently with varying degrees of trauma. Normally this type of information is recounted over more pages and with more reflection or reprieves, but the author included her memoir just to add context to the rest of the book which makes sense.

The next parts are about the author’s journey with learning about C-PTSD and various therapy methods in processing the trauma. It’s very interesting to go on the journey in real time with someone as they try different methods and their advances and set-backs. The rest of the book read quite quickly to me, as the author learns to live with her complex-PTSD and what she does with the knowledge.

It’s a very interesting read, but very difficult to read. It’s heavy and intense and feels kind of like you’re dragged through mud throughout, but I’m glad I read it. It’s well written and covers a lot of ground. The author narrates the audiobook and does a great job, and she actually included some recordings from a therapy session that are particularly interesting.