What My Bones Know, Stephanie Foo
Jan. 9th, 2023 10:26 pmI read Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know, a rec from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thistleingrey, about a... month? two months?... ago. Since then it has been staring at me from the bin where we keep the library books, daring me to talk about it. I finally have had to take it back to the library, and I'm now sitting in the library with it staring back at me, daring me to write about it before we leave and I really do have to return it. [I wrote most of this on Saturday, but didn't finish until tonight.]
It's a memoir of Stephanie Foo's traumatic childhood in San Jose, and her journey through being diagnosed with complex PTSD, and her journey through healing. Her childhood was very traumatic -- over-the-top physical and verbal and emotional abuse ( cut for a description of the kind of thing we're talking about -- warnings for threats of murder and suicide ) Both her parents also abandon her before she graduates high school. I don't know who had the worse childhood, J.M. Straczynski or Stephanie Foo (especially since my brain is doing the thing where it's trying hard to forget JMS's traumatic childhood so I forget the details), but the fact that I'm comparing the two should tell you something.
Foo's journey of recovery is interesting and inspiring, but honestly was not what I remembered most vividly a month after reading it. The section that really got me was when she went back to San Jose to see whether it was as she remembered, and see whether there were other kids in a similar position as she was (as she remembered being the case) -- not quite as over-the-top as she was, but dealing with trauma from their parenting. Most of the teachers are like, eh, everyone was maybe a little stressed about getting A's, but fine.
One of her former classmates says, "Yes. We were all getting our asses beat. Well, not all of us. But. I know a LOT of people who got their ass beat... Yes. Why do you think we were so stressed about getting all those As in the first place?"
This former classmate also says, "I think it's why I work so hard all the time. I'll take on other people's work, I'll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I'll have this anxiety -- this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can't hit." This is a succinct description of a lot of stuff Foo sees herself going through in the first section of the book as well (which leads her to her diagnosis of C-PTSD), so it's very validating for Foo to find her classmate also saying it.
My parents never beat us. I think they spanked us once or twice when we were younger, but that really doesn't register in my memory (or my sister's) as anything particularly bad. ...But I think I need to say that my sister could have written exactly what the classmate in the previous paragraph said. (Not me. I don't have the same scars from childhood that she does, for several reasons, although that's not the same as saying I wasn't affected.)
One of Foo's sections also looks at the way dysfunction and trauma propagate over generations, and... yeah.
Wow, writing this is hard, and I'm going to punt the rest of it. There's a tension -- which Foo does address in the book -- between a bunch of things, of recognizing that Foo's story is so much worse than the story of anyone I personally knew as a child, of recognizing that this doesn't invalidate what someone else went through if it wasn't "as bad" as that, of recognizing the feeling of relief when Foo's story was worse, of recognizing the sinking feeling that I could understand some parts of it, of recognizing that my sister and I had some experiences that were very different from each other and some of which were the same, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were very very good, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were not so good, of recognizing that there were things my parents did that might even have been more helpful than not in my case and the same things being extremely devastating in the long run to my sister, of recognizing that I don't want to display my family's baggage, of recognizing that it might be important to do so.
Anyway, it's a book that I'm glad I read, that's worth reading, and part of what's worth reading about it is that it's so very Asian-American. I'd love to know what other people thought of this book. But I certainly would warn that... it's a lot.
thistleingrey, about a... month? two months?... ago. Since then it has been staring at me from the bin where we keep the library books, daring me to talk about it. I finally have had to take it back to the library, and I'm now sitting in the library with it staring back at me, daring me to write about it before we leave and I really do have to return it. [I wrote most of this on Saturday, but didn't finish until tonight.]It's a memoir of Stephanie Foo's traumatic childhood in San Jose, and her journey through being diagnosed with complex PTSD, and her journey through healing. Her childhood was very traumatic -- over-the-top physical and verbal and emotional abuse ( cut for a description of the kind of thing we're talking about -- warnings for threats of murder and suicide ) Both her parents also abandon her before she graduates high school. I don't know who had the worse childhood, J.M. Straczynski or Stephanie Foo (especially since my brain is doing the thing where it's trying hard to forget JMS's traumatic childhood so I forget the details), but the fact that I'm comparing the two should tell you something.
Foo's journey of recovery is interesting and inspiring, but honestly was not what I remembered most vividly a month after reading it. The section that really got me was when she went back to San Jose to see whether it was as she remembered, and see whether there were other kids in a similar position as she was (as she remembered being the case) -- not quite as over-the-top as she was, but dealing with trauma from their parenting. Most of the teachers are like, eh, everyone was maybe a little stressed about getting A's, but fine.
One of her former classmates says, "Yes. We were all getting our asses beat. Well, not all of us. But. I know a LOT of people who got their ass beat... Yes. Why do you think we were so stressed about getting all those As in the first place?"
This former classmate also says, "I think it's why I work so hard all the time. I'll take on other people's work, I'll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I'll have this anxiety -- this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can't hit." This is a succinct description of a lot of stuff Foo sees herself going through in the first section of the book as well (which leads her to her diagnosis of C-PTSD), so it's very validating for Foo to find her classmate also saying it.
My parents never beat us. I think they spanked us once or twice when we were younger, but that really doesn't register in my memory (or my sister's) as anything particularly bad. ...But I think I need to say that my sister could have written exactly what the classmate in the previous paragraph said. (Not me. I don't have the same scars from childhood that she does, for several reasons, although that's not the same as saying I wasn't affected.)
One of Foo's sections also looks at the way dysfunction and trauma propagate over generations, and... yeah.
Wow, writing this is hard, and I'm going to punt the rest of it. There's a tension -- which Foo does address in the book -- between a bunch of things, of recognizing that Foo's story is so much worse than the story of anyone I personally knew as a child, of recognizing that this doesn't invalidate what someone else went through if it wasn't "as bad" as that, of recognizing the feeling of relief when Foo's story was worse, of recognizing the sinking feeling that I could understand some parts of it, of recognizing that my sister and I had some experiences that were very different from each other and some of which were the same, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were very very good, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were not so good, of recognizing that there were things my parents did that might even have been more helpful than not in my case and the same things being extremely devastating in the long run to my sister, of recognizing that I don't want to display my family's baggage, of recognizing that it might be important to do so.
Anyway, it's a book that I'm glad I read, that's worth reading, and part of what's worth reading about it is that it's so very Asian-American. I'd love to know what other people thought of this book. But I certainly would warn that... it's a lot.
