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A Memoir
by Brittany Means
While untangling the web of her most painful memories, Brittany crafts a tale of self-preservation, resilience, and hope with a unique narrative style—a sparkling example of the human ability to withstand the most horrific experiences and still thrive.
I can't write a story about myself as the sad, quiet child of two drug addicts. That's not how it was, even when it was. To me, sleeping in the car was normal. Better, it was comfy and fun. I loved my bed made of clothes inside a trash bag that I sank into slowly like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family movie... . I loved the motels and their swimming pools and trashy daytime TV channels... . Nobody could tell us what to do.
Brittany Means's childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. Riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany didn't care where they were going—to a roadside midwestern motel, a shelter, or The Barn in Indiana, the cluttered mansion her Pentecostal grandparents called home—as long as they were together. But every so often, her mom would surprise her—and leave.
As Brittany grew older and questioned her own complicated relationships and the poverty, abuse, and instability that enveloped her, she began to recognize that hell wasn't only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the cycle of violence that entrapped her family. Through footholds such as horror movies, neuropsychology, and strong bonds, Brittany makes sense of this cycle and finds a way to leave it.
"This book is an outstanding debut…A harrowing and soulful memoir to be read, savored, and reread."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Brittany Means has pieced together the shards of a devastating childhood in this powerful memoir. It's gut-wrenching but at the same time triumphant, harrowing yet exquisitely told. Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways is a story of survival that left me choked up and cheering."
—Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle
"Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways will change the way readers understand what, and if anything, actually survives our childhoods. What is a parent? But the book's lasting impact might be what it demands of the memoir genre. Brittany Means has, at once, created the most readable and the most psychologically rigorous book I've read in decades. I needed the reminder that art can do this."
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"There are all kinds of memoirs, but some should be read by every person who ever thinks to write or read one. Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways makes that list. What Brittany Means accomplishes on the page, telling the truth of her own life, the brutality and beauty of it, with the prose of a recovering poet, is often attempted and rarely successful. This memoir is a success all the way down."
—Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody's Daughter
This information about Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brittany Means is a writer and editor living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A graduate of Iowa's MFA Nonfiction Writing Program, Means has received several awards for her work, including the Magdalena Award and the Grace Paley Fellowship. Her other talents include doing horror movie screams and baking ugly but delicious cakes.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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Use what talents you possess: The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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