What My Bones Know
2022
- internal medicine
- mental health
- post-traumatic stress disorder
- patients
- biography
- mind and body
- biography & memoir
- psychology
- stress disorders, post-traumatic
- historical trauma
The story
By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD. In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it. Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.
What it’s like
Measured, clear-eyed prose with a radio producer's ear for scene and pacing, moving between intimate memory and reported detail: a clinic waiting room, a San Jose neighborhood, a family kitchen in Malaysia. The mood is heavy but lucid, with long reflective passages that stop to examine the body's responses, then loosen into hopeful, forward-leaning sections. It reads best in quiet, uninterrupted stretches, like a late afternoon with a cup of tea or a slow evening alone. The emotional register is searching and tender rather than sensational. Its arc follows a woman learning to live alongside an old injury instead of expecting it to disappear. Intensity is high in an emotional sense: childhood abuse, neglect, and abandonment are described plainly, and panic and dissociation are rendered in close detail. There is no gore and no sexual content, and the violence is recounted rather than dramatized. Written for readers drawn to memoir, science-minded self-inquiry, and accounts of trauma, healing, and inherited family history.
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