A heart stitched with scars

Dana Kim opens by framing her life as something she would not rewrite, even with the chance to travel back in time. The memoir begins with a childhood memory she can barely see but can vividly feel: as an infant in her crib in the hallway, she kept dropping her pacifier and crying for it until her father, angered by the repetition, threw it into the stove. Her mother later insists she cannot truly remember it, but Dana treats it as proof that even the earliest experiences leave marks. She presents trauma not as a single event but as something that shapes personality, body, and mind across decades. From there, she explains that her story is not about blame but about how she survived what happened and how she learned to live with the consequences. She writes that it took years, and many pauses, to put these memories into words because her mind could not always handle them. Names and places are changed, but she insists the story itself is true to her memory.

In childhood, she believes she was relatively normal, yet two events before adolescence deeply affected her. One was a fatal car accident at a school bus stop in 1978, when her best friend and two other girls were struck by a car as they looked at report cards. One friend died, one was badly injured, and her best friend was left in a coma for months and had to relearn basic functions. Dana did not know what had happened until after school, when she was told the details, and she remembers only the sour stomach and sleeplessness that followed. The second event was a forest fire that swept through her village later that same year, forcing the family to flee to safety while firefighters battled the blaze. Afterward she became afraid of fire, unplugged things around the house at night, and began screaming in her sleep and sleepwalking. She does not connect the incidents until later, but she recognizes that they helped create the anxiety and inner demons that surfaced in adolescence.

As a teenager, Dana describes herself as a gangly tomboy, physically insecure and always feeling like the odd one out. She loved rough-and-tumble outdoor play, fishing with her father, and sports, but she also felt unattractive and self-critical, judging her nose, hair, chest, and even eye color. Her father was authoritarian and critical, while her mother had become subdued in marriage, leaving Dana without much emotional support or confidence-building. When she finally had her first boyfriend around age 17, he seemed friendly at first but quickly revealed that he saw her as a conquest and took her virginity without real care. At the time she did not have language for what happened. Instead she wrote poetry because she could not tell her friends or her mother how hurt and ashamed she felt. She later reflects that the poems were the only way she knew to express pain, sadness, and regret.

Chapter 2 broadens that understanding of harm and consent. Looking back through the lens of #MeToo and later therapy, Dana explains that rape is not limited to physical force: being too drunk to know what is happening, being coerced, drugged, frightened, or trapped can make a sexual encounter non-consensual. She names her own response as “fright,” one of the three Fs, and describes how trauma can cause a person to leave their body and drift somewhere safer in their mind. That is how she experienced a second rape years later by a different man, someone known to her, and the abuse was repeated over time. She did not speak up because she was too deep inside the situation and did not recognize it for what it was. Even later, when she confided in her husband, she still needed years of therapy and several different therapists before she could believe she was not at fault. The memoir ties this to the humiliation and shame that keep survivors silent long after the assaults themselves.

Dana then moves into a first serious relationship with Hank, whom she loved deeply but whose importance also highlights her own vulnerability and low self-esteem. They were young and grew up together in many ways, and she thought the relationship would last forever. But she also says she allowed him to control the relationship and that her desire to be loved kept her from being fully herself. Leaving home became part of that breakup, and she still wonders about the “what if” of their future. Chapter 4 shows how her father’s control shaped her path again: he refused to pay for journalism school, so she had to take out loans, and she chose travel and tourism instead. After college, she knew she had to leave home and build a life elsewhere, though she had not planned to do so so soon. A drunken phone call ended things with Hank, and though she later visited him hoping for reconciliation, he would not commit, which left her feeling rejected and alone. She came to see that she had been pushed out of a small-town life she no longer wanted, but the transition was still painful.

In the next chapters, independence begins to look like survival. Dana first stays with relatives, then is moved to another set of relatives after the first arrangement does not work out. She finds work in a hardware store, rents a room with acquaintances of her relatives, and buys a used bed and dresser from the want ads. Money is scarce; sometimes she scrounges for bus fare, and she does not tell her parents how hard it is because she does not want to appear like a failure. She experiments with weed and liquor but does not like them much, though alcohol and cigarettes become her crutch. These chapters present the fragile early version of her adult life: lonely, precarious, and defined by buses, work shifts, and the effort to keep moving forward.

That precariousness becomes terrifying in the summer of 1986, when Dana attends a camping trip and open-field biker party with roommates. After drinking, she leaves the tent in the dark looking for a restroom, becomes disoriented in the grass, and is seized by her roommate Derrick, who drags her into the bushes and rapes her. The next day she wakes with no memory, only vomiting and feeling unwell. The abuse continues for months, sometimes a year, always when she is vulnerable, half-asleep, or alone in the house. She does not tell anyone because she fears not being believed and fears losing housing if she speaks up. She also calls herself names, wondering whether she is an adulteress or a whore. The shame is so strong that she blocks out what is happening. Eventually she begins placing a dresser against her bedroom door and cleaning obsessively, an early sign of the OCD she will later understand as part of her trauma response. When she finally sees a doctor for feeling sick, she is told she is anemic, and she still cannot say why she feels so unwell.

After finally disclosing what Derrick had done, Dana is met not with comfort but with disbelief from her favorite aunt, who cuts her off and refuses to hear the story. The rejection lands hard, but Dana still keeps the secret hidden for years afterward, continuing to present herself as fine because she has a good job, new friends, Jake, and a safe place to live. Even then, the aftermath of the abuse is not gone. Her sexuality becomes heightened for a time, something she later understands as hypersexuality connected to psychological pain, and both of her planned pregnancies with Jake are shadowed by postpartum depression. The wedding itself is a bright spot, a large summer celebration in her hometown, and when she becomes pregnant with their first child she is also carrying the emotional weight of her grandmother’s diagnosis with skin cancer. The grandmother’s illness and eventual death from a heart attack mark a devastating rupture in Dana’s life. After the baby is born, she begins having intrusive anger and anxiety, snaps at her infant son when he breaks something in his crib, and finally tells Jake and her GP enough to get help. The doctor prescribes medication and sends her for blood work; only later does Dana realize it was likely to test for HIV or other sexually transmitted infections, a reminder of how little language she had for what she had endured. A psychiatrist then treats her for generalized depression, and although medication helps, her OCD still rules her days through compulsive cleaning and fear of dirt.

The family’s next posting moves them to a huge, unfamiliar city where Jake is frequently away and Dana feels isolated with a small child and, eventually, a miscarriage that requires a D&C. The loss triggers her depression again, and fear around sex and pregnancy makes her behaviors more erratic. In the middle of a dark night, while pregnant again, Jake gently asks what is wrong, and Dana finally tells him about Derrick. Far from minimizing it, Jake reacts with anger and wants to protect her, but Dana worries about revenge and instead agrees to seek medical and psychological help. She attends a rape group at a mental health center, though the timing and family pressures keep the healing incomplete. After their daughter is born, Dana describes the early years as a time when she looks externally like a happy mother of two with a loyal Labrador retriever, while inside she is still in turmoil. Jake is away often, their daughter is colicky, and Dana responds by cleaning instead of resting, overcorrecting and trying to control everything around her. She later admits she was not the kind of mother she believed she should be, and while she eventually apologizes to her children, the guilt lingers.

When the family is posted again, Dana is happy to be closer to Jake’s family and finally near the place she can imagine as permanent home. Back there, life is busy and relatively stable until her parents’ marriage collapses. Dana’s mother, who had become deeply involved in the church, is devastated to learn that Dana’s father has left her by phone for a younger woman about Dana’s own age. The betrayal hits the family like a death. Dana sees her mother break apart and recognizes she has become the oldest child, the one expected to hold things together even as her own anxiety returns in the form of racing thoughts, sweating palms, and panic that she does not yet understand. The mother returns home immediately, the father briefly moves in with the other woman, then comes back to the marriage in a tense, damaged state. Dana’s trust in him changes forever, even as she still loves him and wants her family back. Then comes more upheaval: Jake is posted east for a year while the house remains unsold, and the family stays put. During that time Dana learns her father has non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but because her mother has tried to shield her, she does not understand how sick he really is. When she goes home in November, she finds him frail, unable to walk, and dependent on her mother for even the most basic care. He is in denial about dying, and Dana struggles to say goodbye. A final family photo captures them smiling, and her last words to him are a promise to see him soon. Weeks later he dies on 26 December 2007, and the funeral is packed, the coffin marked with a carved fishing boat, but everything feels blurred and unreal to her.

When Jake leaves for his Afghanistan tour, Dana is left in a town that feels small enough for gossip and large enough for her to feel invisible inside it. Their daughter is back in school and outwardly coping, but Dana is constantly on edge, absorbing the anger the girl sometimes turns on her and trying to hold the family together while also carrying guilt over their son being away and doing so well academically. Her mother and sister visit briefly, bringing concern but not relief, and a hospital appointment for her sister becomes the moment Dana can no longer keep her fear contained. In the waiting room, her anxiety spikes so violently that she approaches triage on her own, shaking and overwhelmed, and eventually reveals that she has thought about killing herself by wrapping a phone cord around her throat. The psychiatrist recognizes the seriousness immediately and suggests 48-hour observation, but Jake panics at the idea of her being labeled and promises to help her through it. A new medication is prescribed, weekly therapy begins, and for the first time in a while she starts to learn practical ways of managing her family’s chaos instead of simply enduring it. Those sessions help her steady herself through the months as Jake remains away and the baby’s arrival approaches. When the grandson is born in February 2010, Dana is exhausted but relieved, and when her daughter is blocked from bringing the baby to school after only one day, it falls to Dana to become the child’s full-time caregiver. Her daughter pulls away, resumes teenage independence, and Dana finds herself running on empty, getting up at night and carrying the emotional and physical work of raising her grandson while her daughter drifts. Jake returns from his tour changed, carrying a hollowness Dana can see in his eyes before he even speaks. He tells her about young men being sent home in boxes after repatriation ceremonies, and over time it becomes clear he is suffering from PTSD, even if she does not yet have that language for it. Their daughter is eventually sent away to finish high school with a family friend, while Dana and Jake keep the little boy with them for months. Jake’s drinking escalates, his outbursts become more frequent, and the military’s clearance process offers only a superficial check-in after deployment. Dana watches the signs of trauma and alcoholism accumulate, but still tries to keep functioning as a military wife, hoping that routine will somehow contain the damage.

After they move to what they have long thought of as home, Dana settles into a new routine with her grandson and daughter living with them, their son away at university, and Jake often back on base. Their daughter finishes high school and then begins dating again, while Dana becomes so absorbed in childcare, bills, and work that she misses how far off track the girl is drifting. She sends the daughter to college to study photojournalism, partly because it matches Dana’s own old ambitions, but the young woman soon announces she is pregnant again, this time while in college and on birth control. Dana is shocked, especially because she had tried to warn her daughter about medication interfering with contraception and feared the boyfriend had manipulated the situation. The boyfriend is a heavily tattooed man with a poor reputation, and the pregnancy leads to a child born healthy and strong, but also to a custody battle later on after the relationship breaks down over infidelity and other illegal behavior. Through it all, Dana holds the household together, and over time the two grandsons become central to her life. Her daughter eventually leaves the bad relationship, the parents grow more civil, and co-parenting becomes possible, but Dana never forgets how easily a family can be pulled apart by repeated bad choices and old pain. Meanwhile, Jake’s drinking becomes increasingly severe. By around 2015 he is consuming impossibly large amounts, blacking out, urinating on himself, needing stitches after falls, and talking darkly about hanging himself. Dana begins hiding dangerous objects and living in dread of coming home to his corpse. She repeatedly asks him to seek help, but he refuses until the pressure becomes unbearable.

The crisis finally turns when Jake is diagnosed with thyroid cancer after checking a lump in his throat. Dana shoves her fear into the same mental box she has used for so many other catastrophes, because she believes the family will fall apart if she stops functioning. After treatment and radiation, another blow comes when Jake’s father dies in his sleep, closely followed by Dana’s uncle after a long illness. The family home is sold, Jake’s mother moves nearby, and the sense of stability keeps eroding. Jake is eventually medically released from the military with a pension because of PTSD, and wearing the uniform itself becomes a trigger. Dana is placed on the highest dose of antidepressants and sleeping medication, but she also slips into online shopping as another way to numb herself. Their daughter finally confronts Jake after yet another hospitalization, warning him that if he does not stop drinking, she will take the boys away from him. That threat works where years of pleading did not, and Jake goes to the veterans’ system asking for an inpatient program for substance abuse and PTSD. Even then, Dana is nearly at her breaking point. While he is in rehab, with no contact for the first weeks, the pressure she has been holding for everyone else finally bursts. At work, she cannot function; panic attacks hit her body like fire, making it hard to breathe or think. She feels useless, exhausted, and increasingly convinced that death would be easier than continuing. Only when she realizes Jake is finally in a place where she does not have to monitor his drinking, his nightmares, or the possibility of suicide does she understand why her own collapse happens then. She asks for help, returns to psychiatric care, begins a new medication, and attends weekly group therapy for anxiety where she learns about coping skills and triggers. She also joins family sessions for spouses of people in rehab, learning how to live with sober support and to understand Jake’s PTSD without destroying herself. Journaling and gratitude become part of her recovery, and when Jake comes home sober after two months, he remains sober. Dana is able to see, with time and therapy, that she has triggers too, especially around the old sexual abuse, but she is no longer ashamed in the same way. What happened still hurts, yet she has language, tools, and the knowledge that she can survive it.