I am a writer and I’ve lived a long time, but sadly for the writer in me, life has been relatively smooth. My parents loved each other, stayed married and didn’t beat me or want to have sex with me. I have no addictions (other than chocolate), and mentally I have always had a positive outlook.
But author Lori Lynne Armstrong wasn’t so lucky according to her memoir, Someday I Will Not Be Ashamed: A Memoir, published in 2023. In the introduction, she wrote “I have been many things: scientist, counselor, writer, mother, compulsive eater, mental patient, and drug addict.”
And then: “I had a childhood. It was better than some, and worse than others.”
As a teenager, author Armstrong flirted with anorexia; then she became overweight. The book, like Armstrong’s life, details the men and sleepovers that have no happy endings, through college and work that initially goes well, through marriage to a good man, to childbirth, to chronic pain, to diagnosis of a bipolar disorder, to drug addiction.
Her stories and her honesty are heart-wrenching and one wonders how an intelligent woman can stand being not in control of herself. Her story is so sad for much of the book. In fact, I was waiting for a time in the story when her husband said he was leaving. Instead he stayed and took on many of the household and child-care duties that Armstrong herself would have normally undertaken.
The family moved a lot.
“I once calculated that I went to eighteen elementary schools. My father was an abusive alcoholic; my mother left him when I was five. She married a less violent alcoholic two years later. I had two sisters, four and five years older than me. They were close to one another. I isolated myself in my own sphere, a safe world I built. with books.”
I will not detail the end of the story although the fact that Armstrong has written a book about it all should be a hint that complete disaster is averted.
Someday I Will Not Be Ashamed made me be grateful for my own life, the parents who raised me and my own good luck when it comes to health.
The book is well written and fascinating in its way. Building a sense of self when one feels they aren’t good enough is quite the challenge. I recommend Someday I Will Not Be Ashamed: A Memoir.
