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Tormented by her mother's presence and haunted by her absence, Camille U. Adams gives a breathtaking account of survival and self-determination, reimagining the meaning of escape, its cost, and what comes after.
For generations, the women of Camille U. Adams' family have left their daughters. Some follow the siren call of rum. Others flee from beatings behind closed doors, rushing into any arms that offer refuge. Some simply disappear.
As a girl, Adams finds solace in Trinidad's whispering fever grass, sweet ixora flowers, and the cradling branches of the rose mango tree-roots connecting her to the land's long memory. But on Covigne Road, gunshots echo and men amass in doorways, their mouths and hands promising violation. Home offers no safety: just an explosive father, cowed sisters, and a mother whose only reprieve is manipulation. Cloying, suffocating, the maternal embrace threatens to blot out all else. Is it better to be choked or not to be held at all?
Mapping the fault lines between mother and child (humanity's first and supposedly strongest bond), and with a poet's Homeric vision of her native Trinidad, Adams' astonishing debut weaves the Caribbean island's history of colonial violence with her own family's legacy of abandonment.
Camille U. Adams, PhD, is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her memoir, How to Be Unmothered, was recognized as a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2023. She earned her MFA in Poetry from City College, CUNY, and a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Florida State University. Among Adams' awarded fellowships are an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellowship, an inaugural Granta Nature Writing Workshop fellowship, an inaugural Anaphora Arts Italy Writing Retreat Fellowship, a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a Community of Writers Fellowship, and a Roots Wounds Words Fellowship. Adams served as a juried reader for Tin House, a creative nonfiction editor at Variant Lit, and an assistant editor at Split Lip Magazine and The Account. Her writing has been featured in Passages North, Citron Review, XRAY Literary Magazine, Variant Literature, The Forge Literary Magazine, Kweli Magazine, and elsewhere.
Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. Her memoir, Aftershocks, was selected as a best book of 2021 by over a dozen publications, including Time, Vogue, Esquire, and the BBC, and has been translated into five languages. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, and selected by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai for her Literati book club. Nadia is the winner of a Whiting Award in nonfiction and has received fellowships from Yaddo and Art Omi. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and at the Mountainview MFA program and is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a consulting firm supporting social-change organizations.
