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A Story Worth Telling
In Home, you share your childhood experiences with hunger, addiction, shame, and repeated uprooting through the lens of adult trauma therapy. What inspired you to share your story with readers?
In the beginning, I wrote to give voice to the child I was, to bear witness to her pain and her struggle. It was a way of reclaiming myself. For so long, my childhood was a tremendous source of shame to me, a story I’d never told anyone. Somewhere along the start of the almost ten-year process of writing my memoir, I found Brené Brown and her work on shame. Her quote, “You either walk inside your story and own it or stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness,” stopped me cold. I realized that I had a story worth telling, and that in doing so, it had the potential to help others.
Was there a particular childhood memory that was especially difficult to put on the page?
The most difficult memory for me was contained in the chapter “Dragons.” It describes the story of when my family lived in a hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1970. It was particularly difficult to write about because I was dissociative for much of that time.
How did learning about trauma change the way you viewed your childhood?
Previous to learning about trauma, I perceived many of the skills and strategies I used to survive as weaknesses. Learning that these were, in fact, “hidden talents” was an absolute game changer for me. It shifted my thinking from someone with significant deficits to a woman with assets and adaptive skills she could use in positive ways.
Looking back, were you surprised by how much small gestures shaped your resilience?
Yes. Before trauma therapy, I had difficulty remembering positive moments. After therapy and through the writing process, I was able to remember what I once described as lily pads of safety in otherwise stormy waters, which allowed me to hopscotch to a better life on the other side—teachers, caring neighbors, bus drivers, cafeteria ladies, the parents of friends, and other caring individuals who were sources of support and nurturance.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
After nearly losing her husband, Amy Smyth Miller’s panic spirals out of control. Therapy reveals a diagnosis: Complex PTSD. In search of healing, Amy embarks on a harrowing excavation of her past-childhood neglect, homelessness, parental addiction, and a family history shadowed by suicide. Amid the wreckage, she discovers the people and circumstances that kept her safe and helped to shape her life: her wise great-grandmother’s teachings, the watchful eyes of caring adults, and her own fierce determination. Each memory is a clue, each family story a piece of the puzzle. But the most elusive truth is buried in a forgotten childhood memory-one that holds the key to her deepest fear.
Part investigation, part love letter to survival, Home is a courageous story of trauma and transformation, love and forgiveness, and realizing that sometimes the home you’re searching for is the one you build inside yourself.
Home: A Memoir of Family, Forgiveness, and Healing from Complex PTSD
Amy Smyth Miller’s Home is a tender and unsparing account of a childhood shaped by instability, hunger, addiction, shame, and repeated uprooting, then revisited through the clearer lens of adult trauma therapy. The memoir begins with Miller’s terror after her husband Ron’s heart attack, when an ordinary marital crisis opens a trapdoor into old abandonment wounds. From there, she moves backward through a life of van rides, motels, Catholic school humiliations, vanished homes, family secrets, her mother’s despair, her father’s volatility, and the small mercies that kept her intact: Grandma’s pie crust lessons, warm bread at a friend’s house, a teacher’s faith in her, the fierce shelter of women she calls Las Madres, and finally the hard-won understanding that “home” is not merely a place but a repaired relationship with the self.
I enjoyed the way Miller writes childhood from the inside out. She doesn’t flatten young Amy into a symbol of suffering; she lets her be hungry, observant, funny, embarrassed, furious, loyal, and achingly hopeful all at once. The scenes have a lived-in texture that makes them difficult to shake. I could feel the dread in the old house with the locked room and water-filled storm cellar, the humiliation of being sent home because a dress was too short, the quiet heartbreak of a forgotten birthday, and the surreal horror of cleaning blood from the bathroom floor after her mother’s suicide attempt. Miller’s prose is strongest when it trusts sensory memory: bleach coiling through a room, a motel sign blinking in the desert night, homemade bread arriving like grace. The explanatory passages about trauma and research slow the narrative, but I also understood why they were there. It’s a memoir about what happened and also about learning how to name what happened after spending years surviving it without language.
I found the book’s ideas about forgiveness especially moving because Miller doesn’t make forgiveness feel soft or easy. She refuses the shallow version of it, the kind that asks a wounded person to tidy up the past for everyone else’s comfort. Instead, forgiveness here feels more like excavation: painful, dusty, uneven, and necessary only because carrying the old verdicts became its own kind of captivity. I appreciated that she can see her parents clearly, including their addictions, racism, neglect, and emotional damage, while still refusing to reduce them to monsters. That nuance gives the book its moral weight. The most powerful thread, for me, was the way Miller keeps finding evidence of resilience where she once saw only damage. Singing “Is That All There Is?” in class, protecting her siblings, finding belonging in books and music, working in the fields, returning to school credits when a teacher tells her she can still graduate – these moments don’t erase the pain, but they complicate it. They show a girl repeatedly trying to build a self from whatever scraps of safety she can find.
Home felt less like a straight path from trauma to healing and more like a house slowly being lit room by room. Miller’s final reflections, especially her recognition that the cycle has been broken and that her wounds did not become her children’s inheritance, give the memoir a quiet and deeply earned beauty. I’d recommend it to readers who appreciate reflective memoirs about family trauma, complex PTSD, addiction, resilience, and forgiveness, especially those who want a personal story that’s emotionally honest without being self-pitying. This is a book for anyone who understands that healing rarely arrives as a grand revelation; sometimes it comes as the courage to look back, take the child self by the hand, and finally lead her home.
Pages: 306 | ASIN : B0G736Q1LS
Home: A Memoir of Family, Forgiveness, and Healing from Complex PTSD
Home follows Amy Smyth Miller from a present-day crisis in a Bellingham ICU back through a childhood marked by poverty, neglect, and intergenerational trauma in the Midwest. The book opens with her husband’s heart attack and her spiraling panic, then moves into three arcs, “Roots,” “Rootless,” and “Transplanted,” tracing a line from her great-grandmother’s steady care, through her parents’ addictions and constant moves, to her later work as a teacher and her search for effective trauma therapy. Along the way, she threads in clear explanations of complex PTSD, especially the idea of it as a problem of how memory is stored, and she shows how lifespan integration and other somatic approaches help her piece her life into a coherent timeline and finally feel at home in herself.
The writing is gripping. The scenes are built with simple images that stuck with me. The plastic seat covers in the Buick, the smell of Pond’s cold cream and peppermints in Granny War Bonnet’s room, the dragonflies over the pond, the housekeeper ironing a floral dress on the night of a suicide. These details felt precise, not decorative, and they kept pulling me back to the emotional core of each chapter. The structure works well, too. The prologue sets a very tense, contemporary problem, and then the book steps backward into childhood and returns again to the present with more context. Sometimes the metaphors pile up, and the prose becomes lush. Overall, though, the voice is steady, kind, and unflinching, and I trusted it.
I appreciated that Miller does not turn her parents into simple villains, even when she describes clear neglect, hunger, and frightening behavior. She sits in the mess of loving them and being hurt by them at the same time, and she lets that tension stand. I liked how she shows what grounding or timeline work actually feels like in the room, and how she owns her missteps, including the painful texting episode with her husband. There were moments when the interplay of narrative and research slowed the pace, but I felt grateful for the educational layer. It made the book feel useful as well as moving.
Miller is very clear on the notion of complex PTSD as a long shadow cast by many smaller and larger wounds, and she keeps returning to the question of meaning. Not in a tidy, everything-happens-for-a-reason way, more in a “I refuse to let this be pointless” way. Her focus on protective figures and small stabilizing rituals, especially her great-grandmother’s stories and “angel crowns,” pushes back against the common narrative that survival is purely individual grit. I also liked her insistence that healing is not erasing the past but putting it in order so it stops crashing into the present. As someone reading this as a memoir rather than a clinical text, I appreciated how accessible the psychological parts felt. She explains concepts in plain language and grounds them in specific episodes from her life, so I never felt lectured at.
I would recommend Home to readers who come from chaotic or painful families, to people living with complex trauma, and to therapists, teachers, and caregivers who want a lived-in portrait of what CPTSD can look like from the inside. It is not a light read, and there are frank depictions of suicide, emotional abuse, and neglect, so I would be cautious recommending it to someone in a very raw place without support. For readers who can hold that weight and are looking for a story that blends honest hurt with genuine hope, this memoir feels like a companion, not just a case study.
Pages: 301 | ASIN : B0G5TCG9KJ
Grow An Edible Jungle
Sassy Food shows readers how to grow a sustainable garden that can provide food anywhere and any time. What inspired you to write this book?
I wanted to share the joy I found by growing food – especially in ways I never thought of before, like with sprouts and microgreens. Concentrated yummy nutrition can be grown easily in just a few days! If it’s that easy – we can all be happier!!!
What is a common misconception you feel people have about gardening?
People think that to garden you need land and a lot of space. That’s not true. You can grow an edible jungle on a window sill or a counter. No natural light? Use a grow light. There are almost endless possibilities!
What is one tip that has changed the way you grow food?
Flexibility is key. I use a small hydroponic container to start seeds. Once I get seedlings I transplant them to a container or my small aquaponic tank.
What do you hope is one thing readers take away from your book?
Get in touch with nature and find JOY with growing food in some way, even a small one. You’ll be better able to handle this chaotic world – I’m sure of it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Many people think growing food takes a lot of time and space. And that is not true. Like the subtitle says, it really is possible to grow your own any size ‘farm’ anywhere, anytime of year with any budget. Sassy Food empowers you to take charge of adding peace into your life by bringing nature to your fingertips. All basics are covered from growing food from various growing methods, to cultivation and everything in between. It includes a flexible cooking technique showing how to create your own delicious recipes using a symphony of ingredients, without measurements. Artistic photos of gorgeous Eve models in Hawai’i will spark your creativity as to how you can grow food in your space, wherever you are in the world. Sassy Food shows women no matter what shape, color or age can shine their beauty from the inside out! This book honors food as we ought to honor all the women who plant, harvest, and cook it. Ja-ne hopes Sassy Food will inspire you to be lighter with yourself and bring sassyfreshhh into your focus.
This book is designed to bring light-hearted silliness into your life. It’s hard to maintain that levity with the constant seriousness of life. When Ja-ne does anything with her plants all of that goes away and she is present in the moment of seeing new changes, harvesting something to add to their meals, planting seeds that will grow into new vegan meals—this simplicity is bliss. It restores Ja-ne so she has more energy to go back to caregiving 24/7. Yes, she has not had any time off, much less one day off, since 2019. This is one way that helps her to keep on going. Inside a world pandemic, with wearing masks and social distancing, this artistic beauty was achieved. It shows we are all responsible for our individual choices and can make positive change despite any circumstance.
As soon as she finished writing Sassy Food, she caught up with her sister and brother-in-law. Grover described his experiences as a travel nurse going to COVID hotspots. He wanted to write a book about it and didn’t know how. Ja-ne teamed up with Sandra and Grover. In a few short months, Chasing the Surge was created.
20% of proceeds helps others grow food by providing growing kits and seeds along with growing workshops.
Rises from Humble Beginnings
Carole Penfield Author Interview
Midwife of Normandy follows young Clare as she struggles to save her family and career from France’s tyrannical king. What was the inspiration for the setup to this thrilling novel?
An avid fan of history, I researched 17th century religious persecution of Huguenots by King Louis XIV and was surprised how few historical fiction novels had been set during this turbulent period (as opposed to numerous novels set in other times, like Tudor England.) I also noted that many historical fiction authors focused on women of royal or aristocratic blood as protagonists.
I wanted to do something different, so I created a Huguenot female protagonist, who rises from humble beginnings and dares to defy and outwit male authority, including the King’s soldiers.
After visiting Rouen and the beautiful countryside of Normandy, I felt certain this was the perfect location for my book.
I didn’t think being a midwife could be so interesting and this novel definitely caused me to look more into the profession. Why did you choose this profession for Clare in the story?
Let’s face facts; there weren’t many professional options available to 17th century women. It was widely held that their only proper role was marriage, absolute obedience to husbands, and bearing of children. Midwifery was almost exclusively performed by females, but was looked upon as a lowly trade.
In order to rise above her humble beginnings, Clare decides to offer her services, using a secret ancestral formula for pain-free birth, exclusively to wealthy members of the aristocracy who reward her handsomely, thereby turning midwifery into a lucrative profession.
Clare is a fascinating character that continued to develop as the story progressed. What were some themes you wanted to capture in Clare’s character?
Throughout history, women have struggled against many prejudices. What I set out to achieve was to create a strong, ambitious young woman who sought to control her own destiny. In a sense, Clare was an early pioneer for female equality in 17th century France, as she sought a career. However, she knew she was also obligated to marry in order to bear a female child to carry on her ancestral midwifery heritage.
At first, dewy-eyed young Clare is disappointed when her romantic childhood sweetheart leaves the country and she is coerced into marrying his older, dull brother. However, she turns out to be much stronger than her husband, even to the point of secretly using birth control until she decides the time is right for bearing children. And she is the one who must bravely plot their escape from France.
Another minor theme is the conflict a career woman faces between spending time with her children and working outside the home. A feeling of guilt. This balancing act continues through the present day, so it is a universal, contemporary theme.
What is the next novel that you are working on and when will it be available?
The second novel in the series, Lucina’s Destiny, is now available on Amazon.com. It follows the exciting adventures of Clare and her family as they settle in England.
Author Links: Website | GoodReads
![Midwife of Normandy (Secrets of the Austen Midwives Book 1) by [Penfield, Carole, Lady, A]](https://i0.wp.com/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51O0ysGA90L.jpg?w=604&ssl=1)
Clare Dupres, ambitious young Huguenot midwife living in turbulent 17th century France, struggles to save her family and career from the terrors of tyrannical King Louis XIV.
On the brink of womanhood, she records in her journal the grand plan for her perfect life–marriage to the man she loves, renovation of mysterious Maison Dupres as her home, and a rewarding profession. The key to her plan lies in “the magic elixir,” her ancestors’ secret formula for pain-free childbirth, which she offers solely to wealthy aristocratic women.
But King Louis’ increasing pressure on Huguenots to convert to Catholicism shatters Clare’s dreams. Her lover forced to flee France, she is compelled to marry his boring brother. Then she is banned from practicing midwifery. Yearning to continue her profession coupled with fear that her children will be kidnapped by Papists, Clare tries to convince her stubborn husband to move to England, but he is blind to the growing menace. When danger lurks in the form of the King’s dreaded Dragonnade soldiers, she must summon all her strength and determination to save her family.
Can Clare succeed in getting her family safely out of France before it is too late?
The Troubling Designs of their Lives
Arnold Holtzman Author Interview
Neurotic Children as Adults is a guide to help parents understand themselves and in effect become better parents. Why was this an important book for you to write?
After several decades of professional experience with clients who had been overtaken by serious neurotic disturbances in both their social and intimate partner relationships, along with damaging perceptions of self-worth, and with lives simply going nowhere, it was as clear as the noonday sun how maternal deficiencies and abject parental failures, often from day one, determined the troubling designs of their lives as adults. Inasmuch as I had written this book for young parents whose intentions were essentially very positive but whose own histories perhaps lacked bonding experiences, the experience of worthiness, and a recognition of their most fundamental security needs, it was also written for the adults who might identify with people described on these pages and grasp what had so mangled their own lives. True, genuinely absorbed awareness of what was responsible for the neurotic designs in their personalities offers, in effect, the only leverage permitting lasting therapeutic adjustments.
What do you feel is one common misconception people have about parenting?
Parents rarely grasp the degree to which a child is powerfully molded by just about everything that defines its earliest home environment. Up until about the age of eight the parents are seen as the life models with which they must identify and emulate. Later they may insist that the very opposite is true, but the patterns are effectively ingrained.The early experience of an unstable home environment, grievous emotional scarring, serious and prolonged parental discord produces children who, as adults, are without the capacity to experience true joy in any area of their lives.
I thought you showed a solid grasp of psychology and behaviorism. What background in education or experience do you have that helped you write this book?
A Ph.D. in the behavioral sciences, many decades of private clinical experience and almost as many decades lecturing on these experiences. The last decade included laboratory work in psychiatric hospitals and papers on biometric diagnostic procedures published in academic psychiatric journals.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
When therapy fails it is largely because the therapist has no idea what may be at the root of his, or her, client’s distress. The therapist is entirely without access to the history of the client’s earliest pre-conscious experiences – information that is almost always vital in grasping the very reasons why that person had been moved to invite professional intervention. What sets this book apart from every other in the genre of child development and parenting issues are the perfect links it presents between very specific infant/child stress experiences, and equally specific disturbing attitudes and behaviors in the adult. Nothing is ever lost to memory even such as transpired in the earliest development phases. This work is intended, in the main, as a guide for the genuinely devoted parents of infants and young children. At the same time it delivers clear answers to adults weighed under by lives going nowhere and suffering anxieties of an unforgiving nature.
Fathering the Fatherless
There are two kinds of fatherlessness. The first kind is where the father is never known to the child. The second, the father lives in the same home as the child but is emotionally unavailable and often physically absent too. Both of these have adverse effects on the child. Children need a special kind of love and nurturing from their father. There is some security that comes from having a father, especially in the formative years. Children cannot understand why other children have their fathers but they do not.
Todd Johnson tells a very intimate and personal story about his childhood. He grew up in a single parent home. He talks about the struggles he went through as a result of not having that special father figure in his life. He outlines all the choices he made as a result of his home situation. He talks about how that situation shaped the man and father he is today.
The most important thing in this book is the role of God in a single parent home. One can ask God to fill that void left behind by an absentee father. A fatherless person can find the love and care they need from God. It urges on the importance of God –lead fatherhood.
This book is centered on a very important subject. Fatherless homes are very common not only in America but on a global scale. In fact, the book starts with some very interesting numbers. Numbers never lie. They indicate the percentage of children affected by lack of a father or having an emotionally unavailable father. The numbers give the book a serious tone. One will understand the true weight of this subject.
Fathering the Fatherless makes proper use of scripture. It conveys the message God has about fatherhood. One will have a better understanding of their role once they have read through the verses given. He will understand that being a father has nothing to do with DNA but everything to do with nurturing, caring and loving. That, the kind of father one has great potential to shape character and identity.
The author is obviously very passionate about the subject and the book feels like a personal endeavor. However, the delivery of the subject matter suffers from broken statements, grammar mistakes, and anemic prose. At one point, the author strings together verses from the Bible and at times repeats verses and his personal story feels incomplete. This book does a fantastic job of starting a very important discussion, but stops short of diving into the deep end of that conversation. If you only pay attention to the intended message you can gain insight into what fatherlessness really is and this book does a great job of getting that conversation started.
Pages: 64 | ASIN: 0692075208
Away From Home
Away from Home by Joanne Clairmont is a very real and heartbreaking look into the troubled thoughts and insecure feelings many children and teens experience when part of the foster care system. As an experienced foster mom, Clairmont has dealt with a number of heart-breaking cases of fostered teens feeling lonely, isolated, and abandoned upon entering her home. She writes vividly about the struggles and emotions those in her care have faced, and the unseen turmoil brewing within them as they are placed into yet another new environment. Oftentimes sorrowful, Away from Home is an important read in understanding the ups and downs of the foster care system by those directly experiencing it.
A short book broken up into six sections, Away from Home shares Clairmont’s foster care experiences in poem form. Each section contains several poems related to a specific type of foster child, such as The Unsettled Teenager and The Challenging Teenager. Most of the six sections share the pain and loss of security many fostered teenagers can relate to when thrust into a foster situation. The last section, titled The Independent Teenager, completes the journey of emotional growth of the foster care teenager and consists of more uplifting and positive poems.
I appreciated that the author could interpret the actions of her fostered teenagers from the first night they arrived at her house until they had grown and moved on with their lives. I found the poems in The Unaccompanied Minor and The Unsettled Teenager especially easy to connect with due to their complete realization and understanding of how a teenager would feel upon entering a new foster placement. They presented a personal psychology into the effects of the instability and adaption foster children must cope with through no fault of their own.
I especially liked how the author construed the emotions of a new placement in “Don’t know if I am coming or going.” It was a simple and realistic take on how a newly placed teenager may feel upon arriving in a new place after enduring several former placements. It captures the frustration and identifies the protective wall that has been built up to shield the fostered teenager from experiencing any more emotional loss.
While there were many poems that hit the mark in eliciting a feeling or emotion when read, there were also a few that didn’t do it for me. “It is not cool” and “No school today” seemed like unfinished thoughts or small snippets that could have been better fleshed out. I think the book would greatly benefit from some additional structuring and the addition of more personalized images. The images in the book are generic and vary in artistic design. More simplified, original artwork would do wonders to visually present the ideas and feelings of the poems.
Overall I thought Away From Home really presented the emotional psychology and depth of the foster care system and those who live it. It created a descriptive and realistic picture for those who may not be familiar with the tragedy and distress many teens experience while in foster care. Aside from the few issues I had in reading, this book was an intense, creatively written study of an important subject.
Pages: 52 | ASIN: B077QLBKSC
