Stephanie Foo’s memoir, What My Bones Know is a powerful exploration of healing from Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Foo built a successful career as a journalist and radio producer of This American Life but beneath that exterior was a lifelong struggle with the effects of childhood abuse and abandonment. After years of therapy, she was finally told her diagnosis of Complex PTSD. This revelation became a turning point, opening a new path where Foo would come to terms with her past and find healing.
Foo’s narrative is both personal and investigative, blending her own experiences with research, expert interviews, and stories from other trauma survivors. She details her frustrating search for mental health care, the limitations of cognitive behavioral therapy, and her exploration of other therapeutic approaches, including Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), somatic experiencing, and mindfulness practices. Foo’s journey has no single breakthrough moment, but instead she takes the reader on her slow, nonlinear process of healing.
In telling her own story, Foo also reflects on intergenerational trauma. She explores how cultural identity and inherited pain shape her understanding of trauma and resilience. She confronts the ways in which cultural silence can compound suffering while also recognizing the strength found in community and heritage. This realization inspired the title. As she writes, “"Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand…My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers…I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not (202).
To learn more about healing from trauma, including some books recommended by Foo, please visit the book display on the third floor. Also, please join us on Thursday, April 10 at 6:30 in the MARC Third Floor Commons to hear Foo talk about her memoir.