Plum by Andy Anderegg is one of the most devastating and precise portrayals of familial abuse I’ve ever read. Written in second-person, it doesn't just tell you a story—it makes you live it. J., the narrator, is a child watching her older brother take the brunt of their father’s violence while she scrambles to stay small, stay good, stay unnoticed. From the very first chapter, I felt myself in her—hypervigilant to the moods of an unstable parent, flinching at every slammed door, learning to read adult faces like they were sacred texts, trained by chaos to anticipate disaster before it speaks.

J.’s voice is sharp, poetic, and eerily detached—like so many of us who learned too early that feeling deeply could be dangerous. Her loyalty to her brother is the backbone of her childhood, and yet even that becomes frayed under the pressure of their parents’ manipulation. She is taught to believe he’s the problem, the defiant one, while their father’s rage simmers just beneath every breakfast table interaction. And as her brother spirals—fighting at school, disappearing, eventually hospitalized—J. internalizes what so many abused daughters do: that survival is earned by being quiet, by being good, by disappearing into herself.

So much of Plum reflects the emotional architecture of my own past. The parentification. The shame. The small betrayals I told myself were love. The prose—lyrical, clipped, and viscerally present—captures the staccato rhythm of trauma: looping thoughts, dissociation, the endless calculations of how to keep the peace. J.’s eventual turn to cam work to survive, her use of sex and silence as currency, her longing for escape and refusal to trust it even when it arrives—all of it rings true. This isn’t trauma for drama’s sake. It’s a symphony of survival: dissonant, aching, and real.

What Plum offers is not a clean recovery arc, but something more honest: a portrait of a girl growing into a woman who is still learning how to want, how to trust, how to stay. J. becomes someone who chooses herself, even when it’s messy. Even when it’s lonely. Even when it means burning the last bridges to her past. I hope to be like J.

For those of us raised by rage, by silence, by people who made us responsible for their misery—Plum is a mirror we don’t often get. It reminded me that freedom isn’t always soft or immediate. Sometimes, freedom is a key to a house in your name. Sometimes, it’s walking away. And sometimes, freedom is becoming someone who gets to decide for herself what love looks like. Thank you, Andy, for J.’s fierce story. 

📖 Read this if you love: hauntingly lyrical narratives, deep explorations of trauma and survival, and books by Sarah Rose Etter or Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Generational Trauma, Parentification and Survival, Addiction and Violence, Reclamation of Self and Autonomy, The Legacy of Abuse.