How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir

With a stunning sense of place, Camille U. Adams' unrelenting memoir lays bare the innards of a mother daughter relationship, laying bare hard truths about family, abuse, and identity that challenge the Caribbean literary zeitgeist.

From acclaimed Trinididian writer and scholar Camille U. Adams comes a heartbreaking memoir of motherhood, daughterhood, and the unjust burden of parental cruelty. Breathtaking in its originality, How to be Unmothered showcases Adams' early childhood in Trinidad, contending with an angry father often possessed by Rum and a mother whose only reprieve is control. With a sweltering sense of place, we follow Camille's journey from Trinidad and Grenada to England, Canada, and New York as she desperately uncovers her family's lineage of unmothering, trying to understand her own life in the context of her lineage and the history of the Caribbean as a whole. Investigating African spirituality and pre-colonial Trinidad, this far-sweeping memoir uses one daughter's experience of maternal abuse to pull the veil from Caribbean canon, revealing the pain, hardship, and truth that lies beneath.

Finalist for the 2023 Restless Prize for New Immigrant Writing, How to Be Unmothered will shatter readers' expectations of what a memoir can be. Written in part in the rhythmic patois of Trinidad and Tobago and providing an unfiltered and emotionally raw portrait of an abusive mother-daughter relationship, Camille U. Adams' story will deeply touch all readers and transform the way we think about multi-generational trauma.