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In Brooks’ memoir, she tracks how she finally separates from her mom by accessing anger and words. After her parents' divorce, Brooks’ mom marries a series of seven other men. Her mom’s second husband, Dan, brings Brooks the most trauma. He is her father (as hers is absent), her manager, and her abuser. Brooks knows less about her mom’s later husbands as her own adult life spirals out of control. She marries a domineering husband and discovers his addiction as she drinks to excess. With a new partner and therapy, Brooks distances herself from her troubled past.
Brooks organizes her narrative about anger and mother-daughter relationships into three parts: her childhood, her early first marriage, and, with a new husband, finding a life apart from her mother. The writing is driven and urgent, as is Brooks’ life, dominated in the early part by rehearsals and performances with Dan. The middle section’s pace is more chaotic, matching Brooks’ struggle to find balance after her programmed childhood. A confrontation with her mom as a result of a writing project is the climactic—and ironic—ending, dissipating the tumult.
The peaceful post-confrontation life Brooks finds with her husband and family of rescue animals is not really part of the story. Rather, the nrrative's meat is the raw process, the difficult conversations reenacted in the text and painful memories of Dan that come back unexpectedly, for which Brooks finds no solace. Brooks shares her mother’s beauty and verve. This is reflected in the text, which is dramatic and entertaining, like Brooks’ mother’s all-turquoise decorating style and Brooks’ use of the wrong Spanish words while on her honeymoon in Mexico. Brooks’ purgative confessions and the emotions she works through are a cathartic rallying cry to not be afraid to voice one’s own story.