Osbourne-Crowley has packed an almost unmanageable amount of emotion, trauma and investigative work into such a slim volume. I Choose Elena is a powerful and deeply personal essay about trauma and violence and how untreated traumatic events can lead to chronic physical pain and illness. The road to recovery has clearly been long and not without setbacks, but this memoir does not read like one still in need of more work in that area. The writing is clear, concise and unflinchingly honest - some of the early sections are particularly painful and triggering to read. Toward the end she does drift a little into a more stream of consciousness style, there is little in the way of structured thought here but this isn't a disservice to the essay. Instead, the concluding pages read like someone still striving for recovery, someone still sick, still traumatised and still in pain - but someone who is day by day getting through it and making choices about what will define her moving forward.