Belle Mills’ Mother’s Ruin is a brutally honest and heartbreaking memoir that follows the author’s tumultuous childhood and early adulthood as she copes with the effects of her mother’s alcoholism and emotional instability. Written in raw and intimate prose, the book is both a confession and a cry for connection. It tracks Belle’s experiences growing up in a working-class British town, surrounded by love yet starved of the nurturing and stability she craved. Her account weaves together personal memories, therapy sessions, and vivid reflections on trauma, mental illness, and the weight of abandonment, all told through the lens of someone fighting to make sense of her own pain.

Reading this book shook me. It left me feeling like I’d sat beside Belle through each moment, watching her as a child search for her mother’s approval, as a teenager drowning under the pressure of school and self-worth, and later as a young woman walking the tightrope between survival and collapse. The writing is emotionally dense but easy to follow. Belle doesn’t use fancy words to impress; she tells it like it is. And that’s where the strength lies. Her vulnerability is disarming. I found myself rooting for her, crying with her, and getting angry on her behalf. The structure bounces between timelines at times, but it only makes her struggle feel more lived-in. You feel how trauma isn’t linear. It loops and claws and resurfaces when you least expect it.

What struck me most was how well Belle captures the duality of love and pain, especially the love for a parent who keeps letting you down. The parts about her mother are some of the hardest to read because they’re not one-note. Belle doesn’t just paint her as a villain. She mourns the person her mother used to be and the one she might have been. It’s complicated and messy, and that makes it feel so real. I also appreciated how much Belle lets us into her head. The way she describes dissociation, panic attacks, and suicidal ideation is visceral and chilling. She doesn’t shy away from the darkness. But there’s also beauty in her resilience. Her relationship with her brother, her dogs, and even with strangers who show her small kindnesses, all of it reminds you that survival isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s just continuing.

Mother’s Ruin is for anyone who’s grown up with a parent who couldn’t parent. For anyone who’s carried too much, too young. For survivors of trauma who don’t have tidy endings but still keep going. I wouldn’t recommend this book to someone looking for light reading or an uplifting memoir. But if you want to read something brave, human, and painfully relatable, then this one is worth every page.

Pages: 201 | ASIN : B0DVLYD3C7