A sensory-rich, balanced memoir about an unstable childhood and its lasting impacts
After her husband has a heart attack and a subsequent triple bypass surgery, Amy Smyth Miller’s trauma catches up to her. In the months following his medical scare, instead of her stress calming as her husband recovers, the opposite happens. She has persistent headaches, rising anxiety, and a panic switch that goes off disproportionately to any given situation. She knows something is wrong and goes in search of an answer.
With the help of a therapist, she’s diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and embarks on lifespan integration therapy, a six-month-long process in which Smyth Miller charts her memories on a timeline to better anchor them in place in her mind, leading to more appropriate reactions when they surface again and uncovering positive memories she’d been unable to access before.
Home is a chronological recounting of many of the events on her timeline that Smyth Miller pinpoints as significant, ranging from particularly traumatic while growing up in an unstable house with parents who struggled with drug addiction and mental health issues to more positive things like standing up for others to a teacher or temporary, but impactful friendships. According to her, this book is a way to explore why she succeeded in the face of trauma and how others may be able to as well. Along the way, she also shares statistics and research she found, pointing out why certain events were impactful to her future in both good and bad ways.
At the start of the memoir, the first chapter beginning in 1964, it’s quickly apparent that Smyth Miller’s childhood was full of instability. Her father, working in radio, packs up the family over and over again when he loses yet another job. Her mother finds work at local hospitals wherever the family ends up, but she’s often plagued by bouts of depression. Smyth Miller and her siblings are often homeless, hungry, dirty, and neglected. They move from school to school too often for her to make real friends or find stable support outside of her grandmother, who tries her best to help but can only do so much. Smyth Miller has to step into a parental role, caring for her seven siblings while still a child herself, adding more and more responsibility to her young shoulders. It’s a lot for a young girl to cope with, to say the least.
The events of her childhood are described in crisp, rich prose. Each chapter, covering a different point on the timeline, is sensory-heavy, something Smyth Miller points out is often the initial trigger for one of the memories she writes about. It’s no wonder the writing is so grounded in the sights, sounds, and smells of her childhood. Smyth Miller recalls, for example, the smell of the Ponds face cream her grandmother used or the overwhelming bleach smell that accompanied her mother’s cleaning frenzies that always signaled the impending move of the family once again or the itchiness of the cockroach-infested trailer the family lived in in Doniphan, Nebraska. The events and what Smyth Miller felt at the time can be heavy and distressing, as she describes how hungry they were or how they lived in a house full of seemingly volatile drug addicts for a short time.
Despite this, Smyth Miller looks back with compassion, giving grace to the parents who often neglected and emotionally abused her and her siblings, recognizing they loved her the best they could while they were dealing with drug addiction and mental health conditions. This perspective gives each event a tenderness even amid great trauma. A sense of hope even when she felt her most hopeless.
While Smyth Miller could easily, and justifiably, cast her entire childhood in a negative light in this, she doesn’t. Instead, she is quick to point out the things in her childhood that helped her survive and later thrive after the constant instability, including a close relationship with her brother, Colin, or the mostly temporary but impactful friendships she made at different schools, like the cheerleaders she cheered with in Ord, Nebraska, until the family had to move once again. She acknowledges the way the trauma she experienced in some way made her equipped to succeed in her current role as an educator of special needs children, strengthening her empathy and compassion while still cognizant of the ways in which events negatively impacted her life.
It’s a meticulously balanced memoir, really. The good memories she uncovers and the bad. The negative impacts of a traumatic childhood and the ways in which she used that past to make herself into a stronger, more compassionate adult. It doesn’t lean too heavily on either side, instead showing the messy truth of what she experienced and what she sees now in retrospect.
Home is a tender, sensory-filled, and well-balanced memoir about Smyth Miller’s complex post-traumatic stress disorder and the events of her childhood that caused it. While the experiences of her childhood are often difficult to read about, each chapter is also full of the love she has for her parents, her siblings, her temporary friends, and, most touching of all, her younger self. It’s a book that serves as a reminder that even in challenging situations, resilience, perspective, and healing are possible.
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