Stepping Back from the Ledge
A Daughter's Search for Truth and Renewal
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In this “seismically moving memoir” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice), one woman asks a seemingly impossible question in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide: How do you mourn a loved one as you repair the injuries they inflicted?
“Laura Trujillo resurfaces from the dark ‘sub-basement’ of despair with assurances for us all: There is hope. There is healing. Always, there is love. This book will save lives.”—Connie Schultz, author of The Daughters of Erietown
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker
Laura Trujillo had been close to her mother for most of her adult life, raising her four children within a few miles of their beloved grandmother’s Phoenix home. But just three months after moving her young family to Cincinnati for a new job, Laura receives shocking news: Her mother had taken her own life—by jumping off a ledge into the Grand Canyon, a place Laura knew her mother had always loved.
Laura and her mother had shared a profound and special bond, yet each had also kept from the other the deepest truths about their lives. As an adult, Laura finally broke her silence about the sexual abuse she had suffered as a teenager at the hands of her stepfather—a secret Laura had buried to protect her mother. After her mother’s death, Laura embarks on an emotional odyssey, searching for clues that could explain the depression, intergenerational trauma, and shared heartbreaks in her family. When she returns to the Grand Canyon, it becomes an oasis that nurtures Laura’s search for redemption and peace. As Laura wrestles with her feelings, she forges a new path forward.
Moving and intimate, powerfully told, Stepping Back from the Ledge is a remarkable exploration of the bond between a mother and daughter, and of the hope that can come from facing the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trujillo, a managing editor at USA Today, reexamines the events that led to her mother's suicide in this gorgeous and elegiac debut. Though her mother historically struggled with depression, Trujillo was nevertheless shocked when she jumped off a cliff in the Grand Canyon in 2012. Dissatisfied with the cut-and-dried police reports, the author, a veteran writer, reporter, and editor, set out to find her own answers. As she lucidly traces recollections of her mother from childhood, what surfaces alongside them are trenchant memories of Trujillo's own suffering—namely, the countless times she was raped as a teenager by her mother's second husband. Trujillo kept silent about the abuse until she was 40, when, with the help of a psychologist, she shared her story with her mother (her mother's death followed several months after the revelation, leaving Trujillo to agonize over whether "it was my fault"). Never once reaching for pat metaphors or an easy conclusion, Trujillo recounts her wrenching path to healing and how she held her family together during unimaginable grief. In the process, she offers an aching and stunning portrait of her fallible but loving mother, a woman who "started fires in the bathroom trash," but with whom Trujillo's identity is inextricably entwined. This shines a humanizing light on a subject too often relegated to the shadows.
