A review by masonn
In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country by Kim Barnes

4.0

This was a very moving read for me. I felt the struggle between daughter and father that is framed by a fundamentalist Christian perspective, where the father is the priest of the family and to question his power is to question God. I understood the conflict of finding and forming an identity in a space that actively works to subject and suppress your being—where your essence is labeled as sinful and even demonic.

Barnes does an excellent job of tracing the many people that make up who we are, reconciling the various personas we have carried throughout our past, and tracing the subjective nature of memory as we work to make sense of our present.