Jo Ann Fawcett’s third memoir is an unusual act of intergenerational excavation. Through a series of channeling sessions with the Hedda Foundation, Fawcett interviews the spirits of five maternal and paternal ancestors, beginning with Rosanna Blue, a full-blood Cherokee woman born in 1764, and moving forward through generations of German immigrant farmwives, a Depression-era single mother, and finally Fawcett’s own mother, Betty. Each woman’s chapter blends recovered family history with spiritual dialogue and closes with a curated list of wisdom teachings. The book’s animating thesis is that generational trauma, specifically the suppression of women’s voices and autonomy across centuries of patriarchal society, flows invisibly through family lines, and that naming it is the first step toward breaking it.

What surprised me most was how genuinely moving some of these portraits are. Dorha, Fawcett’s great-grandmother, is particularly vivid: a farm wife who quietly asserted herself in her marriage bed, who gave up her dream of becoming a pianist, who baked mile-high apple pies during the Depression and infused them with a love her circumstances rarely permitted her to express openly. There’s real tenderness in how Fawcett renders these women, and it comes through even in the plainest prose. The writing itself oscillates between genuinely lyrical observations and passages that read like transcribed notes, but when Fawcett slows down, something quietly profound emerges. The thread connecting Rosanna’s forced silence in the white man’s world to Grandma Lella’s workplace navigation of predatory male colleagues to Fawcett’s own seven marriages is drawn with honesty rather than melodrama, and that restraint earns the reader’s trust.

Readers who approach the channeling premise with open curiosity will get more from it than those who don’t, particularly in the wisdom summaries that close each chapter. I found myself caring less about the literal veracity of these communications than about what the project represents: a woman in her seventies doing the painstaking work of understanding why she kept choosing partners who diminished her, and finding, through imagination or spirit or sheer willpower, the language her ancestors never got to use. The book is most affecting when Fawcett is honest about her own damage. Her admission that she didn’t fully reckon with her own molestation until she was seventy, or her mother stating that loving her father was like pouring water into a cup full of holes, are the moments where the memoir earns its emotional weight. The underlying impulse, to locate yourself within a lineage and decide consciously which parts of it you’ll carry forward, is genuinely valuable.

Wisdom from My Grandmothers is not a conventional memoir. It’s a personal reckoning. I’d recommend it to anyone navigating the aftermath of difficult relationships, anyone curious about ancestral healing frameworks, or anyone who has looked at their own patterns and suspected they didn’t start with them.