In this compelling tale, Judy Foreman reveals the terror she felt every night as a girl as she lay in bed frozen in dread, listening for her father’s footsteps coming down the hall.

She recalls his mostly naked body, his stale smell, his silhouette in the bedroom doorway. Worse, in some ways, was her mother’s denial—her insistence that this man was wonderful, her refusal to acknowledge his drinking or his rage. It wasn’t until Foreman spent a high school summer as an exchange student with a Danish family that she began to see how unsafe her own family was; it wasn’t until she went to an all-women’s college that she realized that women had value. Ultimately, this book shows that with time and therapy, it is possible to heal from serious childhood trauma and lead a life of deep fulfillment, rewarding work and, most wonderfully, love. It is a book about the power of emotional courage to change one’s own inner and outer experience of the world, and about what matters most in life: cultivating healthy connections to other people.

Judy Foreman is a former Boston Globe health columnist and the author of three works of nonfiction from Oxford University Press. In 2022, she published her first novel, CRISPR’d, from Skyhorse Publishing. A Wellesley College grad (Phi Beta Kappa), she spent three years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil and has a master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow in Medical Ethics, also at Harvard Medical School, a Knight Science Fellow at MIT, and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She has won more than fifty journalism awards, including a George Foster Peabody Award and a Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers. She lives outside of Boston with her husband.