Aftershocks

De: Nadia Owusu

Narrado por: Nadia Owusu

In the tradition of The Glass Castle, this “gorgeous” (The New York Times, Editors’ Choice) and deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu tells the “incredible story” (Malala Yousafzai) about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.

“In Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu tells the incredible story of her young life. How does a girl - abandoned by her mother at age two and orphaned at thirteen when her beloved father dies - find her place in the world? This memoir is the story of Nadia creating her own solid ground across countries and continents. I know the struggle of rebuilding your life in an unfamiliar place. While some of you might be familiar with that and some might not, I hope you’ll take as much inspiration and hope from her story as I did.” (Malala Yousafzai)

​One of the Best Books of 2021 Selected by Vulture, Time, Esquire, NPR, and Vogue!

Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their good-byes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was 13. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.

With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.

“A magnificent, complex assessment of selfhood and why it matters” (Elle), Aftershocks depicts the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.

“Full of narrative risk and untrammeled lyricism” (The Washington Post), Aftershocks joins the likes of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts.

©2020 Nadia Owusu. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Aftershocks

Very moving and mellifluous. Painfully honest and the author is empathic and you get to watch her awareness shift over the course of the book

Tender, healing, and triumphant

Nadia's recounting of her life is poetically done, thematically structured, and painted a picture of my own pain. it was healing for me to read about her life, because my life was also described. The feelings of not knowing your home, not knowing the people you came from, not knowing who your mother is, all very similar pain experienced. Thank you Nadia for sharing this with the world.

Kept me interested

This wasn't your usual memoir. I really enjoyed it and also found it educational to some degree in reference to her father's culture

Beautiful memoir

This was a beautiful written poetic journey of a complex life. I look forward to her next work

Sometimes less is more

It feels like a truly compelling life story bogged down by delivery and unnecessary information added. It almost felt like she didn’t believe her story was good enough, so she just kept adding anything she could think of.

If you can’t find what you want…. Write it!

I’m always talking to my friends. 1st generation this, 1st generation that… This book slapped the shit out of that and was extremely complex. Nadia, thank you for writing this book. It’s amazing! Can’t wait for the next one. Much love!

Intellectually Stimulating & Emotionally Moving

Nadia is clearly not only a brilliant writer, but also, an intellectual of the highest calibre. I give this book my highest recommendation if you are looking for a storyteller that bares her soul and reaches into the soul of those who read her words.

Litfantabulous

Once, when I was a very little girl in a bubble bath, I asked my father why I had a belly button. He was sitting on the toilet lid reading while I splashed. He peered at me over the top of his book. “So you know where your center is,” he said. “Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked. “So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.”
From Aftershocks.

A story filled with love, longing to belong, identity, loss, displacement, fear, violence, death, disease, abandonment, mental health issues, feminism, sexuality and gender identity. All of this, dislocated her mind and body.

Nadia eloquently shared with us her literary memoir that explores the complexities of family, the meaning of home and the multiplicity of her identity. It exposes how multiple generational and personal trauma, just like an earthquake can cause aftershocks throughout your life. Skillfully embedded in the story is the rich African / Armenian cultural history of her heritage, political unrest in those regions and a bit about the study of epigenetic inheritance.

Her life existing on fault lines created her personal shaking. Her measurement of personal disaster was gauged by her internal seismometer. Her seismometer was triggered by several traumatic experiences throughout her life. Nadia connected the scientific meaning of aftershocks to her personal traumas and incidents leading to it.

Nadia's journey into finding peace and home will start in a blue chair.
"Let me show you my home. It is a border. It is the outer edge of both sides. It is where they drew the line. They drew the line right through me. I would like to file a territorial dispute. Let me show you my home. It is a live fault. The fault is in my body. Let me show you my home. It is a blue chair. I sought asylum here. I marked my application temporary. For myself, I am writing reconstruction, not elegy. Look into my eyes. See my glowing skin. My pores are open. I am made of the earth, flesh, ocean, blood, and bone of all the places I tried to belong to and all the people I long for. I am pieces. I am whole. I am home."

Beautiful, Thoughtful Memoir

Beautiful language, lovely story woven into a tapestry that will hang in my memory long after the final words were read. Nadia narrates it well, also, which isn't always the case with a read-by-the-author selection. Rather than telling her story chronologically, the author works topically through memories of her childhood that she recalls during a personal crisis that emerges following a fight with her step-mother.

Excellent

Just lovely. So much insight. So much context. Such gorgeous writing. It is a memoir and a history of the world.