In Labrie’s raw account, there is the failure of her mother to parent her daughter without resorting to abuse. There is also her grandmother’s refusal to seek medical help for her daughter’s escalating mental health crisis. And LaBrie tells of battling her own mental health issues, making clear the danger she faced in having to parent herself. The author does a remarkable job presenting the ways in which our health care system has failed the women in her family. Much of the memoir focuses on LaBrie’s sense of failure as a fiction writer. She owns up to feeling jealous of a friend who has become popular thanks to her own book: “At parties,” she writes, “when people learn that we are close, they speak about her book in breathless tones: ‘Oh, I love her.’ But you don’t even know her, I want to say back. Ilove her.” LaBrie fears that a novel she is working on isn’t more appealing because she is unwilling to give in to the pressure to write in a certain style: “I’m not postracial, but a Blackness that defines itself entirely oppositional is never a type of Black I learned how to be.” Early on, LaBrie reasons that when faced with problems in life, “No one is allowed to fall apart.” This memoir is her attempt to challenge that perspective.