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optimaggie's review
5.0
This book is super personal as my SIL wrote it and it is about the family I married into, so my review and rating are super biased. That being said, I loved this book. I felt like it was written for me (which of course isn't true, but who doesn't love a book that makes you feel that way). This book made me fully realize how polarizing and damaging a memoir can be to a family. I have loved many a memoir about dysfunctional families, they can be funny, sad, maddening, disturbing and a whole lot else, as fact is often stranger than fiction. But reading this book made me think about the people in the pages in a new way. It made me think about how anyone's story is just that, their story. If another person were to tell about the same times and themes their version would be different. That can be hard to take for the other family members, but I don't think that that devalues the authors account, not at all. We are all here living our own lives with our own stories we tell ourselves running through our heads. We can't help but all have slight variations. This is a beautiful book about a beautiful and flawed family. It is about love and loss and longing. And I think, like all memoirs it is about the author hashing and rehashing their experiences and trying to make sense of it all.
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