The author, a writer based in San Francisco, didn’t get off to a strong start when it came to familial stability: Her biological father, Juan, left when her 18-year-old mother got pregnant in 1975. Heartbroken, her mother married a harsh man named Kurt, who moved their small family from suburban Oregon to an Army base in Hawaii. That tenure was short-lived—by 1983, they had moved to Seattle, where her mother met her third husband, Hamid, who, per Lorente, “didn’t know how to be a stepfather.” The author discusses the ways in which trauma—both inherited and experienced—has defined the course of her life. “Women were taught to hold it in and turn it on themselves,” she writes, describing her mother and herself. “What else can we do with all that rage?” In short, sometimes-disjointed chapters chronicling five decades, she returns to the impact of her formative years while reckoning with her experiences of parenting and her unhealthy cycles of heartbreak. After her own divorce in 2010, she worried about what she was passing on to her three sons. She moved her kids to Eugene, where she studied English at the University of Oregon; boyfriends came and went over the years, to the point that her kids started poking fun at her. By her mid-40s, the author had come to believe that “every relationship with a man will end either in heartbreak or apathy.” Lorente’s prose is light and intentional. The author transitions gracefully between past and present, sensitive to the meanings that emerge from repetition (often in the form of mistakes she made before learning to do better). The memoir’s most compelling thread is her slow realization that she is truly her “father’s daughter,” not only in looks but in avoidant behavior. This revelation—decades in the making—has brought her to a place where she can begin to process her past grief and learn to trust her sense of self.