I aimed to create a memoir that reflects both the many different types of trauma a person can face, and which have, over the course of nearly six decades, shaped my own diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. My work, a multi-genre approach influenced by psychological theory, therapeutic practice, history, and varied life experiences, reflects layered trauma, including Generational Trauma, that trauma experienced by those with distant parents, and those who feel the brunt of domestic abuse. What sets my work apart from that of others who have written about trauma is its perspective is that my work is coming from the trenches; I wrote it while navigating and experiencing my personal recovery from the many facets of my own struggle. Many people who have grandparents who survived horrors, including the Holocaust, suffer from Generational Trauma, or Third-Generation Trauma, but few address it. In this, I attempted to bear witness and pay tribute to the burden of trauma borne by my ancestors, and any other survivors who have worked through the burdens carried by the traumatized.

The memoir sets out to show how a person can learn to not only survive multiple traumatic experiences, but to manage the fallout of this emotional damage, to the point of eventual thriving. It falls into the narrative tradition set by many survivors of the seemingly un-survivable. It is a distinctly post-modern work that includes personal essays, art, and poetry, as they are very different means for the expression of feelings, and carry different weights of emotional impact. Poetry is a safer place for the writer and reader of memoir, as it can be open to interpretation by the reader, just like art, but the essays that shape the memoir are personal statements without any embellishments. Their intent is obvious. The poetry is placed to allow the reader to step away from the pain of the essays.

The other part of this work is a novel about a woman who is recovering from trauma. I opted to use magical realism as the style for the novel for two reasons. First, magical realism allows for a subtle touch on the part of the omniscient author. That omniscience becomes more powerful when granted the power of world-making that comes with magical realism. The second reason I chose it is because there is often no obvious way to define how a person overcomes trauma. At times, because the recovery is gradual and made of many factors, it seems to the survivor to be some kind of unidentifiable magic.