In the tradition of The Glass Castle, a deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through. A Most-Anticipated Selection by * The New York Times * Entertainment Weekly * O, The Oprah Magazine * New York magazine * Vogue * Time * Elle * Minneapolis Star Tribune * … Elle * Minneapolis Star Tribune * Electric Literature * Goodreads * The Millions *Refinery29 * HelloGiggles *
Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.
With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.
Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.
Heralding a dazzling new writer, Aftershocks joins the likes of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts.
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This book was in a way hard for me to review. Her life story is stressful, raw, and full of experiences, all which she described beautifully, she is a talented writer..
She is constantly searching for things that she doesn’t seem to know how to reach. Her mother left her, her sister and their father when she was young and this abandonment never left her and caused a lot of hurt in her life. The author and her sister, lived with her father traveling the world as he worked for the United Nations, so they called many places around the world home for short periods of time. He remarried, but when the author was 13 he died of cancer and they were left with their stepmother and half brother, but once again his death leaves her with abandonment issues again, as he was her best friend and always there for her.
This memoir is Stressful at times, but also informative and thoughtful, with a bit of hope that keeps her going.
I learned a lot about so many things from her different experiences, in the different countries they lived in, as well as the people she meets and how she interacts with them.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for a copy of this book.
Nadia Owusu takes us on a road of rejection ,multiple cultural and social landscapes and her fathers love and acceptance which remains a constant until his early death. The writer quotes Jane Jordan who states I am the history of rejection of who I am .One must question how often can we heal from the pain of rejection ?The writers father explains You have to work twice as hard to get half as far . Michele Obama said in a 2005 speech at Tuskegee University the mostly African -American graduating class that they would be scrutinized harder.They would see their success attributed to others or dismissed all together. The author quotes Rilke who wrote the only journey is the one within In the midst of numerous obstacles the writer succeeds on her journey and serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration for us all !
Nadia has never had a clear answer to the seemingly simple question, “Where are you from?” She has lived in many places throughout her life due to her father’s job with the UN, ranging from Rome, to Dar-es-Salaam, to Kampala, to England, and even New York City. Beyond her varied geographic identity, Nadia has grappled her whole life with her complicated relationship to her cultural and ethnic identity. As a multiracial woman who did not have a cookie-cutter family, she struggles to understand herself as well as her relation to her absent Armenian-American mother, her Ghanaian father, and her stepmother, Anabel.
Weaving together the many time periods of her life, Nadia attempts to craft her identity and true self from the multiple strings making up her life history. While attending university in America, these many ties prove too tangled as Nadia struggles with her mental health in her small New York apartment. However, she is able to overcome the great instability of her upbringing and use writing as her grounding force.
Nadia Owusu delivers an intense and palpable memoir of her life that always circles back to the few days in her twenties when her world seemed to be completely shaken. It is about race, identity, trauma, family, and eventual movement toward a place of healing or acceptance. This book was wonderfully written with interesting metaphors tying all the pieces together.
My Review of
AFTERSHOCKS
By Nadia Owusu
Published by SimonandSchuster
On Tour with and Gifted by: @Bibliolifestyle
On Sale: 1/12/21 – Link in my Bio
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A very heartbreaking memoir from the Author that gets to the heart of several sensitive topics such as racism, assault, loss and family. The many traumas that Nadia had to withstand in her lifetime that ultimately shaped her.
Seeing how the racism existed throughout her father moving them to other countries for his job was disheartening. A raw look at mental illness and of a woman struggling to learn the meaning of home and yearning for one of the same.