Aftershocks

May 11, 2020
In her enthralling memoir, Whiting Award–winner Owusu (So Devilish a Fire) assesses the impact of key events in her life via the metaphor of earthquakes. The biracial daughter of an Armenian mother and Ghanaian father, Owusu’s early life was fractured by her parents’ divorce and multiple moves necessitated by her father’s U.N. career. Living in Rome at age seven, she was visited by her long-absent mother on the day a catastrophic quake hit Armenia, seeding an obsession with earthquakes “and the ways we try to understand the size and scale of impending disaster.” She believed “an instrument in my brain”—a kind of emotional seismometer—picked up vibrations and set off protective alarms. Her shaky relationship with her stepmother Anabel, meanwhile, worsened in her teens after her father’s death from cancer. College in Manhattan offered escape, but at 28 she was devastated by Anabel’s claim that her father died of AIDS: “Although... Anabel was a liar... the alarm continued to sound.” A subsequent breakup with a boyfriend released long-suppressed anxiety, and she spent a week sitting in a chair in her apartment—“almost like sitting in my father’s lap,” and it was only then that she could contemplate the complex love she, her mother, and her stepmother felt for her father. Readers will be moved by this well-wrought memoir.

November 1, 2020
Weaving together her own personal history with that of her parents and the many countries where she was raised, Owusu, author of the chapbook So Devilish a Fire (2018), tells a story of fracture, loss, and mental illness. Owusu's Armenian American mother left the family when Owusu was two, and her Ghanaian father, whom she idolized, died when she was 13, leaving her in the often-resentful care of a Tanzanian stepmother. As an adult, Owusu experienced a mental break following a failed relationship and her stepmother's revelation that her father might have died of AIDS rather than cancer. Owusu's dispatches from the trenches of what she calls madness are brutally metaphoric, elegantly honest, and familiar to readers with similar experiences. In alternating chapters, she explores the many seismic shifts of her childhood and early adulthood, living in African nations torn apart by civil wars and a family torn apart by parental death and abandonment. Aftershocks is a stunning, visceral book about the ways that our stories--of loss, of love, of borders--leave permanent marks on our bodies and minds.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020

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September 1, 2020

Owusu (So Devilish a Fire) reflects on her childhood and identity, writing that her mother abandoned her at age two and she was raised by her father and stepmother. Owing to her father's job at the UN, Owusu lived in several countries throughout her childhood but never felt that she belonged to any nationality. After her idolized father died, Owusu was raised by her stepmother, with whom she had a contentious relationship. When her stepmother tells her a secret about her father, Owusu suffered a depressive episode. This nonlinear memoir navigates that depression and the author's childhood memories, while reflecting on her identity as a biracial woman, as well as topics of colonialism, language, slavery, and faith. The history and culture of her parents, ancestors, and the countries in which she's lived are also explored. At 18, Owusu moved to New York and learned how to survive while caring for her siblings and navigating her personal relationships, the September 11 terrorist attacks, poverty, and racism. VERDICT Owusu's yearning for a maternal figure and acceptance of her identity surround this moving memoir. Recommended for readers who enjoy stories of identity and multiculturalism. [See Prepub Alert, 7/8/20.]--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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November 15, 2020
A biracial multicultural writer grapples with the complex issues that have impacted her life. Owusu opens her debut memoir with a vivid childhood memory from when she was living in Rome with her father, stepmother, and sister: a visit from her long-estranged mother on the same morning she heard about a catastrophic earthquake in Armenia that killed tens of thousands of people. The author's father was Ghanaian, her mother Armenian American, and she makes an emotional connection between her complicated family and cultural dynamics and the fractures caused by earthquakes, the primary leitmotif of the narrative. "My mind has a seismometer inside it," she writes. "Its job is translation and calibration." As Owusu weaves back and forth through time and across multiple locations in Africa and Europe (her father worked for the U.N.), she movingly recounts impressionable, traumatic incidents from her past--most significantly, her father's death one month before her 14th birthday. At 28, Owusu suffered an emotional breakdown and lingered for a week in her New York City apartment, confined to a blue chair she found on the street. Her painful memories filter through the prism of this episode as she reflects on her conflicting relationships with her mother and stepmother, who "introduced mysteries" about her father and the circumstances of his death. In alternating sections, the author shifts from her personal story to offer penetrating insights into the cultures and histories of the places she's lived. Being raised in a variety of cultures, she writes, "made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us." Though the prose is sometimes self-consciously stylistic and the earthquake metaphor strains by the end, this is still an impressive debut memoir. An engrossing, occasionally overwrought memoir by a promising writer.

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