The author, a writer based in San Francisco, didn\u2019t get off to a strong start when it came to familial stability: Her biological father, Juan, left when her 18-year-old mother got pregnant in 1975. Heartbroken, her mother married a harsh man named Kurt, who moved their small family from suburban Oregon to an Army base in Hawaii. That tenure was short-lived\u2014by 1983, they had moved to Seattle, where her mother met her third husband, Hamid, who, per Lorente, \u201cdidn\u2019t know how to be a stepfather.\u201d The author discusses the ways in which trauma\u2014both inherited and experienced\u2014has defined the course of her life. \u201cWomen were taught to hold it in and turn it on themselves,\u201d she writes, describing her mother and herself. \u201cWhat else can we do with all that rage?\u201d In short, sometimes-disjointed chapters chronicling five decades, she returns to the impact of her formative years while reckoning with her experiences of parenting and her unhealthy cycles of heartbreak. After her own divorce in 2010, she worried about what she was passing on to her three sons. She moved her kids to Eugene, where she studied English at the University of Oregon; boyfriends came and went over the years, to the point that her kids started poking fun at her. By her mid-40s, the author had come to believe that \u201cevery relationship with a man will end either in heartbreak or apathy.\u201d Lorente\u2019s prose is light and intentional. The author transitions gracefully between past and present, sensitive to the meanings that emerge from repetition (often in the form of mistakes she made before learning to do better). The memoir\u2019s most compelling thread is her slow realization that she is truly her \u201cfather\u2019s daughter,\u201d not only in looks but in avoidant behavior. This revelation\u2014decades in the making\u2014has brought her to a place where she can begin to process her past grief and learn to trust her sense of self. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The author, a writer based in San Francisco, didn\u2019t get off to a strong start when it came to familial stability: Her biological father, Juan, left when her 18-year-old mother got pregnant in 1975. Heartbroken, her mother married a harsh man named Kurt, who moved their small family from suburban Oregon to an Army base […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}