What My Bones Know

September 1, 2021

Journalist Cheung relates growing up in Hong Kong-- The Impossible City--after its 1917 reunification with China, traversing its rich identities while exploring her education at various English-speaking international schools, the city's literary and indie music scenes, and the protests against restricted freedoms. One of America's top pianists, MacArthur fellow Denk recounts his upbringing and training, clarifying the complexities of the artistic life and the student-teacher relationship in Every Good Boy Does Fine. As Drayton relates in Black American Refugee, she left Trinidad and Tobago as a youngster to join her mother in the United States but was angered by the contrast in how white and Black people were treated and by age 20 returned to Tobago, where she could enjoy being Black without fear. What My Bones Know reveals Emmy Award-winning radio producer Foo's relentless panic attacks until she was finally diagnosed with Complex PTSD, a condition resulting from ongoing trauma--in her case the years she spent abused by her parents before they abandoned her. Growing up fourth-generation Japanese American in Los Angeles directly after World War II, Pulitzer finalist poet Hongo recounts spending his life hunting for The Perfect Sound, from his father's inspired record-player setup and the music his Black friends enjoyed to Bach, Coltrane, ukulele, and the best possible vacuum tubes. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Negroland, Jefferson offers what she calls a temperamental autobiography with Constructing a Nervous System, woven of fragments like the sound of a 1950s jazz LP and a ballerina's movements spliced with those of an Olympic runner to explore the possibilities of the female body. In Home/Land, New Yorker staffer Mead captures the excitement, dread, and questions of identity that surfaced after she relocated from New York to her birth city, London, with her family in 2018. Vasquez-Lavado now lives In the Shadow of the Mountain, but once she was a Silicon Valley star wrestling with deep-seated personal problems (e.g., childhood abuse, having to deny her sexuality to her family) when she decided to turn around her life through mountain climbing; eventually, she took a team of young women survivors up Mount Everest (150,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from December 6, 2021
Foo, radio journalist and former producer of This American Life, recounts her astounding story of living with complex PTSD (C-PTSD), a diagnosis that describes the psychological pain experienced by those who’ve suffered recurring traumas. To find her “redemption arc” and reckon with her trauma, Foo felt she needed “to tease apart the careful life I have crafted for myself, the one that is threatening to unravel at any minute.” She exceeds her intention by delivering a heartrending portrayal of the physical abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her parents, immigrants from Malaysia (“If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous.... The world itself becomes a threat”). Foo also writes of the therapeutic work she undertook in her adulthood to heal and the agency she’s gained from it. “C-PTSD is a wily shape-shifter,” she writes. “Each episode is its own odyssey... requiring new bursts of courage.” What takes this brilliant work from a personal story to a cultural touch point is the way Foo situates her experiences into a larger conversation about intergenerational trauma, immigration, and the mind-body connection (“I was casting abuse and bad parenting as a central theme across my community—was this perpetuating a negative, unhealthy stereotype?”). This is a work of immense beauty.

February 1, 2022
A radio journalist and former This American Life producer recounts how she healed from complex PTSD. In her early 20s, Foo began seeing a therapist to discuss her boyfriend and other problems. But it was only after she left California and turned 30 that the therapist diagnosed her with complex PTSD, explaining that "sufferers of complex PTSD have undergone continual abuse--trauma that has occurred over a long period of time, over the course of years." Using her investigative journalism skills, Foo began probing her troubled past. She remembered her unhappy mother's violence and how she later became her father's adolescent "caretaker" after her mother left. By high school, family dysfunction had transformed her into "a tiny, foul-mouthed pirate" who could not keep friends. Foo's research into trauma and the brain later led to the conclusion that she had become "trapped within [a destructive] loop of stimulus, response." She quit her stressful job at This American Life to interview neuroscientists and psychologists, practice yin yoga, join a childhood trauma support group, try experimental therapies, and care for the endometriosis she realized may have been a bodily reaction to years of living with C-PTSD. Foo then returned to her childhood home in San Jose to "fact-check my abuse." In the course of interviewing old acquaintances, she realized how trauma had turned her otherwise beautiful hometown into a place she could only remember as "a place of hurt." Ultimately, it was a stable, supportive connection to her new boyfriend and his loving parents that led her to final acceptance of how abuse and self-hatred had warped her mind, heart, and body. As Foo sheds necessary light on the little-discussed topic of C-PTSD, she holds out the hope that while "healing is never final...along with the losses are the triumphs" that can positively transform a traumatized life. A sharp, insightful, and stirring memoir.

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Starred review from January 1, 2022

Foo, a journalist and radio producer who grew up in San Jose, CA, writes her first book, a memoir about trauma, abuse, and therapy. She is the daughter of Malaysian immigrants, both of whom endured harrowing experiences before arriving on U.S. shores. Foo writes that her mother was physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive; Foo was once beaten to the point where neighbors knocked on the front door of the family home, concerned at hearing her cries. Her parents divorced in her early teens and subsequently abandoned her. Forced to make her way to adulthood on her own, Foo tried various kinds of therapy, including EMDR, before meeting a doctor who helped her learn new ways to communicate and process emotions. In this memoir, she discusses being diagnosed in 2018 with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), which tends to affect people who have experienced repeated trauma over a period of years. Foo broadens the scope of her book to include research and interviews with Asian American peers who experienced similar intergenerational trauma and abuse. VERDICT Foo's writing is shrewdly insightful. In telling her story so compellingly, she joins authors such as Anna Qu and Ly Tran in adding nuance to the "model minority" myth, if not actively subverting it. Highly recommended.--Barrie Olmstead

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.