Nadia Owusu

Jumpy: that's how I'd describe this. And maybe that was a choice, a way of portraying the mental illness with which the author struggled, but I found it made it difficult to connect with her. Owusu also did the thing that irritates me, that I'm seeing more and more often lately, which is to write scenes in which the narrator or main character makes poor or unexpected choices without delving into what they're thinking. If I'm sitting there asking, "But why did they do that?" it makes me feel frustrated. Even just saying that they didn't know why they were making that choice would be better than suddenly writing like an outside observer with no mental or emotional connection to the scene.

The history was interesting, as it related to the memoir, but I also found that the longer historical passages took me out of the narrative and made it hard to rejoin. Owusu did a good job describing her breakdown, and I can't fault an actual memoir for the fact that it wrapped up so jarringly quickly and with no mention of what happened after that "recovery," when she came out of what really sounded to the reader like a manic episode.

Beautiful writing, but the book didn't work for me.… (more)

This is from the back cover of the book: "As young Nadia followed her father, a civil servant with the United Nations, around the globe, she bounced between Africa and Europe before moving to the United States to attend college. The fractured geography she called home mirrored the multiple identities she laid claim to through a Ghanaian father descended form Ashanti royalty and an Armenian American mother who abandoned Nadia when she was two. Noida has, at different points in her life, felt stateless, motherless, and uncertain about who she really is. At other times, she has been overwhelmed by her identities Is she European, African, American? All, or none of the above?
At no point does this fractured sense of self make her feel more unmoored than when her father dies. This cataclysmic event is compounded by the bombshell secret her stepmother reveals after his passing, a secret rife with shaming innuendo.… (more)