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My Ashes: Memoirs of a Misbehaving Woman
"How would you feel if my father impregnated you?"
"But our child would be your half sibling!" I wailed, completely inconsolable. You tried to comfort me by rubbing my back, but really, how the hell does one process such a proposition?
"I know," you said,"but at least we could keep my lineage intact."
Jenna Avery has been drawn to the idea of true love like a basic bitch is to pumpkin spice. At least basic bitches leave feeling satisfied. Jenna, however, has run the gamut when it comes to relationships. At the age of 30, she closed out her twenties with three ex-husbands, a suitcase filled with daddy issues and a margarita at the ready. Despite the trauma of narcissists and psychopaths, she found a way to rise above it all and create a successful business, travel the world and eventually, finding answers to questions she didn't even know she had.
My Ashes explores the idea that while we're all culpable for our actions, that maybe we're motivated in ways we never considered. Compiled of letters to the men that have influenced her, either positively or negatively, Jenna explores the trauma that most women encounter multiple times in their life, while also doing some soul searching. Closure was the name of the game, humor a mere side effect.
Triggers. They're the worst. The memories of what you've done are sometimes easily avoided, like pushing away a plate of food that disgusts me. The triggers, however, are what sneak up like the boogeyman. More than twenty years later, I still have trouble processing everything, despite over a dozen therapists, years of drugs, and thousands of hours spent 'fixing.'
My Ashes is not only a memoir of hookups and divorces, it's the journey of an average woman deciding that she wasn't going to continue allowing her daddy issues affect the path she took in life. Whether it's writing a heartfelt letter to her brother to writing about how it felt to find photos of herself having sex on the internet at the age of seventeen, Jenna finds ways to show that we're all connected through our experiences.
A must read for any human. Especially if you dated Jenna.
"But our child would be your half sibling!" I wailed, completely inconsolable. You tried to comfort me by rubbing my back, but really, how the hell does one process such a proposition?
"I know," you said,"but at least we could keep my lineage intact."
Jenna Avery has been drawn to the idea of true love like a basic bitch is to pumpkin spice. At least basic bitches leave feeling satisfied. Jenna, however, has run the gamut when it comes to relationships. At the age of 30, she closed out her twenties with three ex-husbands, a suitcase filled with daddy issues and a margarita at the ready. Despite the trauma of narcissists and psychopaths, she found a way to rise above it all and create a successful business, travel the world and eventually, finding answers to questions she didn't even know she had.
My Ashes explores the idea that while we're all culpable for our actions, that maybe we're motivated in ways we never considered. Compiled of letters to the men that have influenced her, either positively or negatively, Jenna explores the trauma that most women encounter multiple times in their life, while also doing some soul searching. Closure was the name of the game, humor a mere side effect.
Triggers. They're the worst. The memories of what you've done are sometimes easily avoided, like pushing away a plate of food that disgusts me. The triggers, however, are what sneak up like the boogeyman. More than twenty years later, I still have trouble processing everything, despite over a dozen therapists, years of drugs, and thousands of hours spent 'fixing.'
My Ashes is not only a memoir of hookups and divorces, it's the journey of an average woman deciding that she wasn't going to continue allowing her daddy issues affect the path she took in life. Whether it's writing a heartfelt letter to her brother to writing about how it felt to find photos of herself having sex on the internet at the age of seventeen, Jenna finds ways to show that we're all connected through our experiences.
A must read for any human. Especially if you dated Jenna.
252 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 9, 2017
6 people are currently reading
11 people want to read
About the author
Jenna Avery
4 books20 followersThe origin story of Jenna Avery is complex, weird, and requires numerous alcoholic beverages to regale. The current story? She's an elder millennial with a penchant for evolving and growing. This is a polite way of saying her ADHD makes her choose a new hobby every three months. By the time you read this, who knows what she'll be into. Just ask. Otherwise, she lives with her horde of kids and pets, a golden retriever husband, and rotating residency of soon-to-be-dead plants.
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May 1, 2017So many of us are broken; so many of us hide it. We do our best to forget our past and sometimes we succeed. But we all have our painful experiences - the things that have made us who we are. We're all so afraid to say these things, because it makes us vulnerable, but when we open up and share ourselves completely, we allow space for amazing connections to flourish.
It's so amazing to hear someone else's experiences. To know that I'm not the only one who has lived through things like this and to cry at stories that I'm not sure I would have survived.
This book is a raw life with very little filter. It's very painful and not always flattering to the author. It's a hard read for those of us with high empathy. But the payoff is completely worth it.
It's so amazing to hear someone else's experiences. To know that I'm not the only one who has lived through things like this and to cry at stories that I'm not sure I would have survived.
This book is a raw life with very little filter. It's very painful and not always flattering to the author. It's a hard read for those of us with high empathy. But the payoff is completely worth it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review