Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my copy of this e-arc

What a breathtaking beautifully written story!

A beautiful book. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a review.

This book is breathtaking - for the beauty of the prose, which is masterful and unflinching; for the quiet, tired wisdom; for the devastating longing. It is the longing, and the anger, and the love that stays with me. The world is brutally unkind, and yet Juno Roche longs for it within stories of addiction, stigma, and families shattering apart.

It reminded me a little like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, with a rhythmic, poetic account of inter-generational trauma and the legacy of violence. It was poignant but difficult at times, as the middle-class daughter of a working-class mum who made it out of that life - it felt like being told whole stories when before I was only shown snippets, because my mum knew (and as Roche says in the book), once something is inside your head you cannot get it out, and my mum didn’t me to know of the violence and hopelessness.

Both nourishing and heart-wrenching, this memoir is witty and charming when positioning the COVID-19 pandemic against the trauma of HIV, when fruitlessly chasing sobriety to Egypt, when reminiscing about pubic lice. There is always a gut-punch in the beauty. I never thought I’d cry about pubic lice, but here we are.