How to Be Unmothered

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, Camille U. Adams weaves the Caribbean island's history of colonial violence with her own family's legacy of abandonment.

For generations, the women of Camille U. Adams' family have left their daughters. Some follow the siren call of rum, the centuries-old vice which alighted on Trinidad's shores from European ships. Others flee the behind-closed-doors beatings of husbands, fathers, and brothers, rushing into any arms that offer refuge. Some simply disappear, their passage marked by unkept promises and open wounds.

As a young girl, Adams finds solace in Trinidad's whispering fever grass, sweet ixora flowers, and the cradling branches of the rose mango tree—all of their roots connecting her to the land's long memory. But where flora gives way to the rank pavement of Covigne Road, gunshots echo and men amass in the doorways of derelict garages, their mouths and hands promising violation.

Home offers no safety: just an explosive father, cowed sisters, and a mother whose only reprieve is control. Cloying, suffocating, the maternal embrace threatens to blot out all else. Is it better to be choked, or not to be held at all?

Tormented by her mother's presence and haunted by her absence, Camille U. Adams' dazzling debut, How to Be Unmothered, is a breathtaking account of survival and self-determination, reimagining the meaning of escape, its cost, and what comes after.