Reviewed by Samantha Paige Rosen

One of the earliest lessons Jeannine Ouellette learns is "although broken things can often be hidden, most will eventually be found, and few will ever be fixed." Ouellette's first memoir, The Part That Burns, mirrors this brokenness in its fragmented, cyclical structure and in the painful moments she excavates. There are physically broken things: a pebble cemented in her knee from a childhood fall, an episiotomy during the birth of her daughter. And there are emotionally broken things stemming from an abusive upbringing and mismatched first marriage: flashbacks of past trauma, difficulty feeling safe. The finding is in remembering, retelling, and discovering herself, her family, memory, and trauma—particularly exploring how trauma can be inherited. And while there may be no fixing, there is surviving, growing, and storytelling.

The fragments Ouellette shares in vignettes could stand powerfully on their own (and many have in other publications), but they work beautifully together. From age four to the present, she takes us from Minnesota to Wyoming and back again, into houses and apartments she's loved and endured, including foster care.

We are introduced to Ouellette's childhood through the dogs that move in and out of her life. Narrated by a young Ouellette, these accounts are all the more heartbreaking when presented in a frank, observational manner. "If something bad happens and only you see it, it could be your fault," she says of not telling her parents that her family dog got hit by a car. She recounts being "kicked out of the family"—a term coined by her mother—whereby she is banished to the basement except for school and food and is completely ignored. In another moment, we sit at the kitchen table with Ouellette and her father on her 13th or 14th birthday and watch her stepmother fail to acknowledge the occasion. As father and daughter eat cake in silence, Ouellette remarks, "It was like we were in a play together, the two of us, pretending it was someone's birthday, pretending we were celebrating, hoping the audience believed us."

Ouellette hides these broken things by disassociating from her body, observing the world around her—how the "July sun bounces off the smooth surface of North Center Lake and pours brilliant white light into the room"—and searching for doorways. From a young age, she actively seeks portals into other worlds, looking under tree branches, waterfalls, canyons, and, when things get really bad, inside herself. She covets motherhood: the ultimate doorway. As Ouellette ages, doorways seem to find her, and they're not always welcome. "Once you step through them, you can't go back," she reflects. The theme of doorways extends to the book's form, as Ouellette offers her readers opportunities to enter her world with each new vignette. We are changed by having walked through every fragment, for better or worse.

At times, what's behind these doorways only feels bearable thanks to Ouellette's exquisite imagery, inviting voice, and slivers of humor, like when she describes her toddler Sophie chattering to her squirrel friends, Carl and Sugar. ("'Now kiss Sugar,'" Sophie instructs Carl. "'Say sorry.'") The imagery, often nature-related, typically comes between or alongside traumatic scenes. Most indelible is when her stepfather rubs his hands between her legs, "like he does," before she leaves for elementary school. The focus, though, is on studying her mother's dresser with "one doily, a fancy brush and a comb and mirror" and "two figurines with their arms outstretched." This is how she survives.

The prose itself is vivid and poetic. Her descriptions are patient, meticulous, dazzling: "High above the lake, a flat disc of moon hung like a nickel, slicing open the black water with a sharp tunnel of light." She has a way of making the simplest of lines just as enchanting. "I devoured every possible good thing," she explains about taking care of herself while pregnant. And her verbs are charged with energy: "thrashing," "swelling," "humming," "searing," "bouncing," "shivering," "blazing," "pummeling." Ouellette's dialogue reads as though she remembers every word from her entire life.

Throughout the rest of the memoir told from her adult perspective, Ouellette frequently revisits earlier stories, layering new information as her memories resurface and evolve. She gives further dimension to the people we've come to know. This is the finding of the brokenness. Oftentimes, these revelations make us even more upset with those who have hurt our author.

One of the most shocking is that her mother knew about her stepfather's abuse from the beginning. When Ouellette discovers this as an adult, her mother demands she "get over it." In a stunningly-painted scene immediately following, however, Ouellette changes the way we understand her mother, at least to some extent. She imagines the details of a gas line explosion her mother lived through when she was 18 at a party. She colors her mother—orphaned, pregnant, and married all at 17—as youthful, insecure, unfulfilled: "Mom's cheeks, round and high, glowed with alcohol and summer. . . But her lazy eye went loose. . . as she watched her young husband holding court in the harvest gold of the kitchen." Her mother's ear was ripped off, her shoulder dislocated; her two best friends were killed. The tactical positioning of this scene seems to hint at Ouellette's ability to forgive and may be encouraging us to do the same. When she writes like this, we're willing to follow her wherever. With everything we know about her mother, it's a testament to the power of Ouellette's language that we can feel for her.

The experience of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood—that coveted doorway—is what forces Ouellette back into her body and the trauma associated with it. She ruminates on the epigenetic nature of trauma. Epigenetics is the study of how environment affects the expression of our genes. It's possible that trauma can leave a mark on our genes that gets passed down through generations. She worries her children won't be able to escape her trauma at a cellular level, that she is "the part that burns." After giving birth to her second child, she recognizes that "the part that burns is the part that glows." Our bodies hold trauma, and maybe it's even passed down, but they also do unfathomable things, like bring children into the world. These things can exist within us at the same time.

This is a narrative about the eternal process of becoming. Becoming an adult, becoming a mother, becoming a storyteller, becoming connected to our bodies, becoming more than just our painful pasts. "It takes so long to become anything," Ouellette writes. "Especially yourself." This is what both author and readers learn by the end of the book: we are always becoming ourselves, regardless of whether that involves any hope of fixing.