Home Is Within You

A Memoir of Recovery and Redemption

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Pub Date 25 Apr 2023 | Archive Date 15 Sep 2022
Nadia Davis | Girl Friday Books

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Description

Home is Within You is Nadia Davis' tour de force combining prose, poetry, and letters to her three sons in a powerful homage to finding one's truth and strength within. With brutal honesty and delicate interludes, Davis reveals childhood and adult traumas that led to struggles with mental health, chronic pain, addiction, and dysfunctional relationships. Tying in blessings of transformational healing, Davis describes intensive trauma work, pain management, healthy co-parenting, preventing learned toxic masculinity, generational trauma, and more. Home is Within You also connects Davis' indigenous and immigrant family heritage, as well as her seeking justice for the wrongfully convicted, 

As a young high profile lawyer, school board member in Southern California, County Supervisor in Northern California, and former wife of California’s attorney general and treasurer, Nadia Davis has been a public figure in California for over two decades. Her experience in the trenches of a highly publicized abusive relationship led Nadia through the challenges and pain of public shaming, a total lack of privacy for personal issues, isolation, injustice, arrests, and mandated treatment.

Home is Within You details Davis'. courageous journey towards wholeness and health as a woman, mother, and co-parent. It is also a defense of privacy and motherhood, as well as a call to action against shaming of women and ineffective, often damaging systematic policies towards families struggling, with suggestions for more compassionate methods of treatment and restorative justice enabling those to ultimately find their way out of darkness into the light of knowing their infinite true selves, strength, and home within.

Home is Within You has received rave reviews from BookLife (10 out of 10 in every category, Semi-Finalist in Critics Award), Clarion, and Kirkus, among others. 

Nadia Davis is the mother of three sons, a writer, attorney, and kundalini yoga teacher. She graduated from U.C.L.A. with a degree in Sociology and specialization in Juvenile Justice and Loyola Law School with a Juris Doctorate. Nadia has received numerous awards for her work improving the lives of others, including the John F. Kennedy Jr. Public Service Award, National Woman’s Political Caucus Woman of the Year Award, and L.U.L.A.C.’s Hispanic Woman of the Year.

Home is Within You is Nadia Davis' tour de force combining prose, poetry, and letters to her three sons in a powerful homage to finding one's truth and strength within. With brutal honesty and...


Advance Praise

BookLife

"In these tender, urgent letters to her sons, Nadia Davis reveals her life, vulnerability, and journey toward healing. Home is Within You is alive with Davis' honesty and vulnerability, threading both her pain and the hard work of recovery and healing into its pages. Her frank accounts of grief, loss, and assault are upsetting, but the memoir's hopeful trajectory sees Davis - 'that little bright-eyed brown girl who simply wanted to save the world but sometimes hid in the closet'- building a thriving career, giving back to the community, and finding the strength to face trauma head on." 

BookLife Prize Award Critics Review 2022:

10 out of 10 in every category 

"Plot/Idea: Home is Within You is author and attorney Nadia Davis's love letter to her three sons about her family history and her struggles with abusive partners, alcohol and drug addiction, and mental illness. The book is a brilliantly executed memoir from start to finish.

Prose: Davis's prose is a perfect combination of direct, confident, unashamed, and sometimes snarky. She has a true eye for gorgeous descriptions and poetic interludes that always enhance the narrative in a meaningful way.

Originality: The author's plain and open honesty about enduring a chaotic life is refreshing and cathartic. Home is Within You also completes the difficult feat of being an immigrant narrative that works against the false forward mobility narrative of the American Dream by highlighting her family's difficulties and flaws.

Character Development/Execution: Davis's memoir proceeds linearly through the story of her parents, childhood, and adult life, but time in the narrative is excellently complicated by intrusions of letters to her sons and commentary about mental illness/addiction--a perfect way to illustrate how past trauma intrudes into daily life on the page.

Blurb: A hybrid memoir that combines poetry, prose, and letters to her sons, Nadia Davis's Home Is Within You is a tour de force work of striking power about learning how to live, thrive, and survive the consequences of childhood trauma, abusive relationships, alcoholism, drug addiction, and severe mental illness." 


Clarion "methodical..powerful...centering motherhood,, Home is Within You is a delicate memoir about whole-person healing and its wider impact." 


Kirkus calls Home is Within You "a memoir of healing from trauma and addiction from a well-known West Coast political figure...With admirable candor, she shares a story of resilience, delving into childhood and adult traumas, including a nearly fatal car accident and difficulties involving a stalker, and tells how she worked to overcome intense feelings of 'shame, fear, and resentment." Davis is an open and unwavering narrator who presents readers with explicit descriptions of sexual assault, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. The work touches on issues of privacy, motherhood, injustice, and mental health, including important criticisms of how addiction is criminalized and misunderstood...A remembrance with a powerful message about strength and recovery." 

BookLife

"In these tender, urgent letters to her sons, Nadia Davis reveals her life, vulnerability, and journey toward healing. Home is Within You is alive with Davis' honesty and vulnerability...



Featured Reviews

An inspirational read on overcoming past traumas and reflecting on them. I would highly recommend this to anyone, especially someone interested in these topics.

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I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a very helpful book. It would be a good resource for anyone who is trying to deal with past trauma.

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“It is not easy to have courage to be vulnerable,” Nadia Davis writes. That being said, in reading Ms. Davis’s memoir “Home Is Within You,” it is clear that she is a woman of tremendous courage. This book is not your average memoir. Rather, it is something both quite different and quite wonderful.

The book is written in the form of letters by Ms. Davis to her three sons about things she has faced in her personal life - trauma, abuse, and addiction, among others - and social issues she has faced both as a private person and public figure involving the greater good. They are the things that have had a part in shaping the person she once was, the person she is, and the person she is on the road to becoming.

On the surface, Davis, a prominent California attorney and public figure, might appear to some to have it all. For that reason, I suspect that some people will fear her book is just another public whine fest by a spoiled celebrity, and dismiss it as uninteresting and self-serving on its face.

But “Home Is Within You” anything but those things. It is a book clearly written from the heart. Ms. Davis is intelligent and introspective. She owns up to her mistakes without trying to justify them. She is honest about both her triumphs and her failures. I found myself frequently identifying with the author’s sometimes brutally honest observations about herself as things I saw in - and felt about - my own self. I doubt that most people who read “Home is Within You” will not see themselves on at least some common ground with Ms. Davis, regardless of whether they have struggled with addiction, been a victim of trauma, or undergone the same ordeals Ms Davis writes about.

Because much of what Ms. Davis has written comes from a place of pain, the book can be difficult to read at times. But it also comes from a place of hope, and it is on hope and healing that Ms. Davis focuses her message.

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this is about abuse and trauma, and how to restore inner peace within yourself, very well done and written from the heart- these stories are filled with anguish, but the author offers rays of hope in treatment and justice especially for women in abusive and trauma incidents. I would suggest this to anyone learning about self-care and wanting an insightful and thoughtful book about ways others have coped with trauma

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