It's fascinating to me that the negative reviews of this book about a woman who spent her life being gaslighted and disbelieved focus on whether or not her account is believable. Having gone to a Christian university with many folks raised incredibly sheltered with limited homeschool education, nothing about her managing to overcome that read as false or unbelievable to me. Three of the seven siblings got PhDs and her parents run a successful business. She never said she came from a family of unintelligent people. Just uneducated. And incredibly abusive, full of mental illness, and isolated. I find the way she grapples with memory moving. She doubts herself, asks other people, references her journals and the way she'd try to edit her memories even then so that things matched her dad's reality and not her own. She is used to being disbelieved not only by others, but by herself. She acknowledges that memory is imperfect, and points out when hers and others' don't match. She anticipates our disbelief, and yet, again, I find nothing unbelievable anywhere in this.

This memoir is not inspirational. It's not a survivalist adventure. It doesn't have a message, per se. It's simply one woman's story of escape, and how complicated escaping can be on an emotional level.