I generally enjoy memoirs of people coming to terms with their difficult pasts, and I wanted to love this one more than I did. The author does have a unique story to tell, and there are fascinating aspects of both her family of origin, the American family she met as an exchange student, and her family as an adult. The issue is that she covers so much of her life on a somewhat surface level and goes back and forth in time so much that the larger coherence of the narrative suffers. She mentions incidents in which she overshares with people in her life, and this book felt that way at times, as if she could not pick out the parts that were most useful to express. (I’d love to know more about the specifics of her time as an exchange student and the American family she stayed with, for instance, but they are mentioned almost exclusively with regard to their influence on her.) This books reads as if the writer is doing a complete psychological inventory of herself, and while this seems to have been helpful to her, it’s not necessarily clear and compelling for the reader. At the end she rushes to wrap things up in a way that feels too rushed and pat. I’m glad she has seemingly benefited from her realizations over the course of this book, and she does have an interesting story; I just found myself wishing she had told it differently.

As a mom who is also trying to heal childhood wounds, break generational curses, and overall do better for my daughter, I related deeply to Shigeko in her memoir. Like Shigeko, I often catch myself falling into toxic familial patterns. Shigeko writes with raw honesty, as she explores her emotionally neglectful childhood and how she was forced to reparent herself in order to parent her child. The aspect of cultural differences between Japanese and American family life was also very enjoyable to learn about. This was a solid book and I would recommend it to all parents grappling with parenthood due to their own childhood.