A raw, and unsparing memoir that explores survival, family betrayal, systemic failure, and the fierce will to keep living when the world offers no safety.
“Please, God, take the pain away,” Caldwell writes at the opening of the book, moments before pulling the trigger of a gun that—by sheer mechanical accident—does not fire. “Apparently, I don’t even deserve the mercy of death.” That failed suicide attempt frames the memoir not as a story of healing, but as an inquiry into how a person comes to believe that disappearing is the most reasonable answer. Born into a military family bound by loyalty and silence, Adriene grows up beneath the shadow of her mother’s untreated schizophrenia and violent instability. Houston in the early 1980s becomes a landscape of fear, where physical, emotional, and sexual abuse coexist with deep poverty and neglect. Through a child’s eyes, love and terror blur together. “Life outside her arms felt too big,” Caldwell writes of her grandmother, the one figure of safety. When that grandmother dies, the world tips permanently off balance.
Caldwell’s childhood is not a sequence of events so much as a training ground in erasure. “I tried to disappear within the rigid framework she built … but invisibility was never protection. Shadows were still fair game.” Her mother, both damaged and damaging, is not simplified into a villain. She is shown as a woman crushed by incest, untreated psychosis, and abandonment—yet still capable of terrifying cruelty. What follows is not rescue but rotation: relatives’ homes, crumbling apartments, shelters, CPS interventions that document “progress” while children continue to suffer. Teachers, social workers, and therapists drift through her life like temporary weather systems—some kind, some indifferent, none lasting. The system is not actively evil; it is worse. It is procedural. It is satisfied with paperwork that says “stable” even when nothing is.
Caldwell survives in part because she is brilliant. Books become her hiding place and her mirror. She enters gifted programs and eventually the Duke University Talent Identification Program’s ADVANCE Camp, one of the few places she feels seen. Yet even there, trauma travels with her. Caldwell graduates with honors, but adulthood exposes the invisible cost of survival. Depression, self-sabotage, and hollow relationships drag her back toward the edge. “Death was supposed to be my escape,” she admits. “And yet here I am. Still breathing.” When Caldwell rereads her CPS files and psychiatric reports, she confronts the gap between official language and lived truth. Stability is declared where abuse thrived. This split forms the moral center of the book. Caldwell’s story ends not with healing, but with refusal. Not triumph—just persistence. “We are damaged, not broken,” Caldwell writes. “We are Unbroken.” Not whole. Not saved. But not erased.
Readers who loved Educated by Tara Westover and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls will find a similarly gripping story here.
Pub date March 17, 2026
ASIN B0FHY52WZ2
Pages 221
Price $4.95 Kindle edition
