Aftershocks: A Memoir

If you like reading about a person who exaggerates her mental health issues, then this is for you. I admit that I just couldn't get past the first fifty pages because the author has, in my opinion, written a "poor me" memoir. I only wish I could return my copy.

Once, when I was a very little girl in a bubble bath, I asked my father why I had a belly button. He was sitting on the toilet lid reading while I splashed. He peered at me over the top of his book. “So you know where your center is,” he said. “Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked. “So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.”From Aftershocks.A story filled with love, longing to belong, identity, loss, displacement, fear, violence, death, disease, abandonment, mental health issues, feminism, sexuality and gender identity. All of this, dislocated her mind and body.Nadia eloquently shared with us her literary memoir that explores the complexities of family, the meaning of home and the multiplicity of her identity. It exposes how multiple generational and personal trauma, just like an earthquake can cause aftershocks throughout your life. Skillfully embedded in the story is the rich African / Armenian cultural history of her heritage, political unrest in those regions and a bit about the study of epigenetic inheritance.Her life existing on fault lines created her personal shaking. Her measurement of personal disaster was gauged by her internal seismometer. Her seismometer was triggered by several traumatic experiences throughout her life. Nadia connected the scientific meaning of aftershocks to her personal traumas and incidents leading to it.Nadia's journey into finding peace and home will start in a blue chair."Let me show you my home. It is a border. It is the outer edge of both sides. It is where they drew the line. They drew the line right through me. I would like to file a territorial dispute. Let me show you my home. It is a live fault. The fault is in my body. Let me show you my home. It is a blue chair. I sought asylum here. I marked my application temporary. For myself, I am writing reconstruction, not elegy. Look into my eyes. See my glowing skin. My pores are open. I am made of the earth, flesh, ocean, blood, and bone of all the places I tried to belong to and all the people I long for. I am pieces. I am whole. I am home."

The author begins the book without the depth she reaches midway. Her historical account of her life and her ability to hold you hostage and have you recognize and empathize with her inner musings, is masterful. Relationships with mothers and daughters are always complex, but she spins it and you feel you are there. Furthermore, she gives wholeness to her grief over her Father's death and her uprooted life. Her acting out and acting in behaviors are made believable and she anchors the story to a blue chair whose significance is implied but never fully understood.There is a lyrical quality to the writer that matches the journey she is describing. This book is well done!

Educational, moving and compelling, Nadia Owusu’s memoir is a GREAT way to begin the new year. Using earthquakes and aftershocks as metaphor, Nadia takes us through her well-traveled life and knits the pieces of her disparate experiences together to a whole, to home.One further note on the audiobook: Nadia narrates her own memoir, and it is all the more powerful from her incredible talent.

This book is heartbreaking, life affirming and maybe the best thing I have ever read; it’s like watching someone create a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle out of 10,000 pieces whirling in a cyclone. Faith endures.

Although some parts have left me confused and had to do some research on certain things I still enjoyed this read. She has been through a lot and she is a brave woman. I like how she doesn't let religion shape her life but believes in logic as her father told her to think freely. Some of the things she had to endure really upset me but overall I think this is a good read.

This story of Nadia’s life and her struggles, her quest to find her identity is thought provoking and made me really look at my own life and examine who I am. I walk away from this book with many observations about my identity as a white, middle class, middle American and how privileged my life has been. It also makes me re-examine race not only in American but globally.

In the beginning I wondered “what did I chose to read”? And shortly into this book I could not put it down. Thanking this author for sharing her story with all the historical, cultural, theological and racial knowledge.

This is a quite interesting account of the author's first thirty or so years of life, focussing particularly on the many different identities she has had or adopted, and her mental health problems. Its merits are considerable honesty, for instance about her lifelong level of privilege relative to many of the other people she came into contact with, and about wider issues such as African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.In her introduction she makes clear that she has elided facts, or altered some people and events for effect, but it's not easy to judge how far this has been done. And it is impossible to judge how far her accounts of the abuse she suffered at the hands of others are accurate. The book appears to have been constructed out of a number of articles and essays and particularly in the last third of the book, this is possibly the cause of the book losing direction somewhat and becoming somewhat repetitive.But still worth reading, and well-written.

Nadia Owusu writes her memoir in a feeling voice that touches and resonates deeply in me. She is an exquisite researcher, story teller, poet, artist. The book is bone-deep honest and brims with metaphor from deep within the living earth.