How Wildflowers Grow

"Why did you stay?"

It is the question people ask most once they hear she gave nearly two decades to a man who called her names she won't repeat. Nobody asks what he did. She has given a dozen answers over the months: the kids, the fear, the fact that he always kept trying. The truest one is the hardest to say out loud. She didn't know it was abuse while she was standing inside it.

How Wildflowers Grow is the longer answer. It starts in childhood, with a girl locking her own bedroom door before she can explain why, and follows a way of loving people she learned early and kept offering to the ones who used it. She made the Dean's list with a 4.0 and earned a full scholarship while the rest of her life came apart. She bought the house and raised the boys and still could not walk out the door. Then she did, and Part Two is the year after leaving that nobody warns you about: a rented house down a dirt road, two sons caught in the middle, dating apps, and five-minute voice memos to men she had known four days.

It is also funny, because it happened that way. In Fyeo Hale's words, "The funny and the unbearable arrive in the same paragraph in here, sometimes in the same sentence."

This is not a recovery story with a bow on it. "I am not a cautionary tale and I am not a redemption story," she writes. "I am a woman who kept growing in dirt nobody chose for her, and I am going to hand you the whole plant, roots and all, dirt still on it."

For readers of I'm Glad My Mom Died and The Glass Castle.

Content note: this book describes domestic abuse, sexual assault, self-harm, addiction, and suicidal behavior.