by Nadia Owusu
First published 2021
Nadia Owusu moves from Rome to London to Dar es Salaam to Kampala as a child. Her mother leaves when Nadia turns two. The abandonment creates confusion about who she is and where she belongs. Her father dies when she reaches thirteen. Her stepmother raises her, but Nadia still feels motherless and lost. She arrives at university in America at eighteen carrying multiple personas that threaten to split her apart. The pressure of holding these different versions of herself together nearly breaks her. Nadia must dig through the wreckage of her fractured childhood to find solid ground. She discovers that the only foundation she can trust is the one she creates through writing her own story. This memoir traces her journey across continents and through trauma to claim her identity as a Black woman without a clear home.
Genres: literary-fiction, coming-of-age, autobiography, memoir, biography-memoir, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Dar Es Salaam, Kampala, London, Rome
Period: 21st-century
320 pages · Paperback · Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: mental-illness