Monday 14 September 2020

Review: Coming Undone by Terri White


To everyone else, Terri White appeared to be living the dream, named one of Folio’s Top Women in US Media and accruing further awards for the magazines she was editing. In reality, she was rapidly skidding towards a mental health crisis that would land her in a locked psychiatric ward as her past caught up with her.

As well as growing up in a household in poverty, Terri endured sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a number of her mother’s partners. Her success defied all expectations, but the greater the disparity between her outer achievements and inner demons, the more she struggled to hold everything together.

Coming Undone is Terri’s documentation of her unravelling, and her precarious navigation back from a life in pieces.



Review: This book comes with care warnings for addiction, self harm, suicide, abuse and sexual assault. 

Those care warnings do mean that this book is a challenging read at times but challenging in the best possible way. This is not a book you will pick up and breeze through in one sitting. You have to take this book in decent doses and sit with it a while before moving onto a new chapter. And sit with you this book will, I am still thinking about all of the things that this writer has overcome and gone through in her life. This is a very transparent account of being a recovering addict and battling with mental health issues. 

Not only did it strike me how honest this book was, something i greatly appreciated, but this book is written so well it is almost poetic at times. It is tough to get your head round how something so horrific could be written in such a beautiful way and how things which might seem normal and even nice to some people can be so incredibly painful to others. 

I loved that this memoir is not necessarily linear but more of a reflection and so therefore events and experiences link back to others. I liked that we got a full account of what it is like to be hospitalized on a psychiatric hold and how childhood trauma can have a whole host of effects in later life. This book was an eye opener for me and I really recommend listening to the audio as it is read by the author. Take the care warnings into consideration when picking this up but I do recommend this audiobook to you. 

To order your copy now, just click the link: UK or US

1 comment:

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