Book Review: Our Lives In Pieces

Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

A fierce look at the human condition through a powerful personal story

In Our Lives in Pieces, Tracie Adams collects over forty flash essays, each one an intimate snapshot of the author’s history. These pieces, published in various places in 2024 and 2025, follow similar through-lines and make for a moving collection that is more than the sum of its parts.

Organized in three parts, titled “Shattered,” “Tattered,” and “Mattered,” this collection follows a general direction of darkness to light, of despair to hope. These elements are both always present, the one never totally eclipsing the other.

Adams, now a grandmother of five, has lived through her fair share of tragedy and she shares her experiences with a brave voice and an incisive pen. We read about addiction, depression, anorexia, miscarriage, sexual assault, and the tragic circumstances around the deaths of friends and family members.

The book opens with the most devastatingly told of the author’s stories, her experience with the death of her nephew from leukemia. After he had lost his eyesight due to complications with his transplant, she helped him write goodbye letters to his circle. I don’t know how you couldn’t be moved by this kind of writing. It can be hard to find something hopeful in this section, but we are bolstered up by a grateful aunt’s letter to the organ donor who gave her nephew two extra years of a life well-lived.

Another of the most impactful parts of the collection is where Adams talks of her adopted son. A troubled youth, he went to juvenile prison, which naturally brought great suffering to her family. She even speaks about the unspeakable—occasionally feeling regret about adopting a child, about wanting to give the child back. Adams’ openness will inspire others to be more forgiving to themselves about circumstantial thoughts that are, ultimately, natural.

A common refrain in the book is the author looking upwards in her search for hope, sometimes explicitly surrendering herself to God. These admissions of powerlessness can make for sharp moments of incongruity, nestled as they are in writing of such punctuated emancipation. Elsewhere, Adams manages subtler expressions of existential angst:

“I found a pile of feathers in the road, evidence of a wild turkey’s struggle with a predator. When my struggle ends, I hope I leave behind something beautiful, something with bold color and soft edges.”

In speaking so freely about herself, Adams has achieved with her flash essays a powerful portrait of a very real person. The light bullying of the bookish kid, the childish machinations designed to get the attention of a youthful crush, the regrets about not spending more time with a sick loved one, the uneasiness with getting old and not recognizing oneself in the mirror: Adams speaks at a level so personal that it breaks through to the universal.

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