thatokiebird 's review for:

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

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.