The best books about surviving family trauma, using scars as teachers to turn one's life around

The memoir is based on a female perspective of being one of an English immigrant couple living, working, and raising a family in challenging and changing South Africa, which I found a riveting read.

Val’s having to play the singular parent—wife, mother, breadwinner—while putting up with her husband's self-centered behavior, I thought, was no less than soul-crushing. Her husband’s badly formed, egoistic decision-making led him to leave her and their family in South Africa to pursue better job opportunities in the Netherlands.

Miraculously, her grit and determination not to be defeated but to rise from such an otherwise devastating separation were, to me, no less than inspiring. Highveld Ways is a great read coupled with an incredible insight into the changing land of South Africa during and shortly after Apartheid. 

I am highly recommending this read which coincides with the theme of regeneration and renewal, which to me are the gifts that are left to us by our traumas.

In The Generosity of Scars, Scott discusses his 30 years of living and working in high-pressure situations, such as when in service as an American Green Beret in Afghanistan. 

Mann has written The Generosity of Scars in the hopes of helping others channel their life’s challenges into meaningful storytelling, while being most interested in what he calls the ‘real human connection’ in a world in which the machinations of AI are swiftly overtaking.

The author has also appeared on TED stages and before Congress. Yet, what is most impressive to me is his successful fundraising for non-profits and the like.

"While we can't completely escape trauma, we can productively integrate it into our lives." —author Larry Bograd

It was the eve of thirteen-year-old Larry's bar mitzvah... and the eve that his doctor father snuck into the family bathroom and hung himself. Grief entwines families in many secrets, and Larry spent the next forty years unmasking them.

I’ve known this author from when he was a young professor, and I was one of his literature students at MSU in Denver, Colorado. What I hadn’t known then was the quiet trauma that haunted him throughout his youth with the baffling question of why his own father, a Ukrainian child immigrant with a later promising medical career and loving family, could have done such a thing, which left them all a growing family with deeply puzzling scars.

Larry’s quest to unravel family secrets motivated a youthful quest into what was then the pre-glasnost USSR. There Larry found little more than unanswered questions about a suspicious culture he had little to no access to. It wasn’t until much later in life, when faced with open-heart surgery and the loving support of his wife and daughters, that Larry doggedly pursued answers within a closed extended family of relations still hesitant to give him anything more than suppositions.

Blood Flow is a personally engaging story read in part in dialogues of gleaned understanding through unanswerable questioning. The memoir I thought to be one of a healing heart embracing the loving family around him while letting sleeping dogs lie. 

This narrative read to me like an emotional rollercoaster—one that was both heartbreaking and uplifting.

The explorative core, I felt, was created by the deepening sisterly bonds throughout. In this, the protagonist, Imogen, develops an understanding of what it means to love and be loved. I both liked and related to how Imogen poured her creative energies into her artwork while experiencing her past and present converging and colliding.

What has been described as a real-life fairy tale—in fiction form, of course—is one that sneaks up on Imogen. She literally doesn't see it coming. And the read itself is so whimsical that one like myself could easily get lost in its plot. With that in mind, it’s a fun recommendation.

The story is now quite a famous one, which has since been made into a TV miniseries.

Yet, my having lived over two decades in a once-occupied country, I’ve become especially sensitive to the toll that foreign occupation brings on conquered nations, their inhabitants and cultures. 

In All the Light We Cannot See, we as readers become instantly immersed in the cultures of two children—one blind and living in Paris; the other a German orphan with little direction in life other than his love of tinkering with machines. The read itself, I found provocative in that it explores the innocents—mostly women and children—caught up in the devastation of war.

The novel’s setting is the current Breton village of Saint-Malo, but in the 1940's, where the paths of two teens—a blind French teenager, Marie-Laure (Loberti), and a German soldier, Werner (Hofmann)—cross after Marie-Laure fled Paris with her father to what was thought to be a safer family home in one of France’s western ports. This is also where Marie-Laure stumbles across a great-uncle’s radio.

Werner, meanwhile, has been conscripted into the German army after his talent for ham radios was discovered and thought able to be used to track resistance radios. And through a series of near-tragic events, the two youthful lives of supposed enemies are entangled and unfold.

All in all, it’s a story one cannot simply walk away from, both during and after its reading.