Stray: A Memoir

 

This memoir from Stephanie Danler, recounting the trauma and aftermath of a life with two addicted parents, is a well-written, insightful look behind the curtain of her experiences and how it’s impacted who she is today.  Her youth to adulthood was marked by instability, the divorce of her parents, both parents using and abusing drugs and alcohol, physical and emotional abuse, shuttling between homes, and dealing with narcissistic behavior from those meant to set the example for her and her younger sister.

The book is divided into three parts, and up until the last part, I felt fairly detached from her story, like I just couldn’t connect to her experiences.  Her life in some ways mimicked her parents, overindulging in alcohol, drugs, and general self-destructiveness.  She had a long-term affair with a married man, waiting foolishly for him to leave his wife.  She had physical relationships with other men on the side.  For the most part, her life choices seemed pretty foreign to me.  It wasn’t until the final few chapters that I realized that I was struggling with her story because it was touching a nerve - or a lot of them. She wrote:

“We have a gift for suffering silently.  No one taught us how to trust the world, or that we could, so we trust no one.  We’ve never developed a sense of self.”

She continues:

“What is shocking isn’t that we have lived through the traumas of our lives. The miracle is that we’re still remotely permeable.”

That really resonated with me, as someone still working through the repercussions of her own less than ideal upbringing.  I understood exactly why she wanted to build walls, and I understood the vulnerability that comes with tearing them down and letting people in.  It’s the moment of understanding that the details of and responses to trauma are as varied as the people experiencing it.  This book is an example of someone starting to see, as she said, that being victimized doesn’t mean you have to live as a victim.

I would say if the first two parts of this book are the storms and destruction, the final part is the sun finally peeking through the clouds.

★★★ ½