I DON’T GOT THIS

I DON’T GOT THIS is a moving account of life with a schizophrenic mom and the author’s recovery from alcoholism. Emily Journey tells her story with compassion, humor, and a sense of self-discovery. A wonderful revelatory memoir of personal struggles with mental illness and alcoholism. Emily is an only child from Phoenix who has no family besides her mother. That is until she turns nine, when she finds out her mom has a sister, an ex-husband, and four other children she left behind in Columbus, Ohio. Through dozens of moves— first from apartment to apartment in Phoenix and then back to Columbus—Emily learns how to live with a mother who is much more than eccentric: a mother who begs her not to get into any white Cadillacs with strange men; who quits jobs for mysterious reasons; who is sure the neighbors are opening her mail and sneaking into the apartment when she’s not at home. (Then again, sometimes the neighbors are trying to get in.) At 18, Emily can’t move out soon enough. But once she does, she struggles well into adulthood with marriage, divorce, money, motherhood, and alcoholism. The beginning of her road to freedom finally finds her, once she admits, I don’t got this.