Give Me a Memory

What do you do, when your grief has no memory and you are haunted by love that was never there?

From the tropics of Jamaica to the affluent North Shore of New Zealand's largest city, Robyn's childhood looks like paradise.

Her adult life seems successful, too—until she stands for election to a city council. After years of local leadership, the unexpected loss spirals her into a life-threatening hunt to get the support she desperately needs.

Robyn comes to realise that her childhood of chronic emotional neglect cannot simply be left behind. Denial and dissociation helped her survive her experience, separating her from the unbearable pain and grief. But the result is complex trauma, a condition akin to PTSD, only worse. Now as an adult, that survival instinct to dissociate is the very thing making her symptoms so hard to heal—along with a poorly equipped health system that retraumatises survivors at every turn.

Readers of What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo and No Words for This by Alison Mau will be drawn by this brave, tender, insightful, honest, and hopeful book, backed by thorough research and references to leaders in the field of childhood trauma.