Publishers Weekly
06/17/2024
In this riveting debut, Azure Ray singer Fink chronicles her chaotic relationship with her mother and the process of repairing the damage it caused. During Fink’s Alabama childhood, her mother claimed to be a witch, chalking up her erratic behavior and hot-and-cold treatment of friends and family to manifestations of her powerful magic. In the early 1990s, Fink fled her unstable home for Birmingham, Ala., to start the band Little Red Rocket. Still, her mother’s emotional manipulation and her father’s meekness consistently pulled Fink back home. She broke free for good in 2019, when she settled in Twentynine Palms, Calif., and, while working with a Jungian psychotherapist, recognized her mother’s behavior as a symptom of undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Though Fink highlights how writing this account helped her “face biggest fears,” she delivers far more than a therapeutic exercise—her lyrical prose and keen imagery lend the proceedings undeniable weight. Equal parts cutting and compassionate, this tale of hard-won peace will resonate with readers wrestling with their own complicated families. Agent: Yfat Reiss Gendell, YRG Partners. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
A story of power, family, and struggle, [The Witch’s Daughter] is a captivating look at growing up in the shadow of a dominant, unstable parent.... With rich imagery, thoughtful reflections, and compelling prose, Fink’s memoir will resonate with readers of Tara Westover's Educated.”
—Booklist
“Riveting...Equal parts cutting and compassionate, this tale of hard-won peace will resonate with readers wrestling with their own complicated families.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[A]n emotional memoir of [Fink’s] long struggle to wrest herself from her manipulative, destructive mother....A memorable book of raw, unvarnished recollections.”
—Kirkus
“When you finish this book, you will turn around and give it to someone who needs it. This is a master text on surviving trauma as a child and an adult. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Phoebe Bridgers
“Orenda Fink's captivating memoir cascades with life and loss. Part detailed description of a gnarled family tree, part rock n' roll tell-all, part exorcism of the many demons that her and us can recognize in ourselves but do not understand. I have been a longtime admirer of her art and have been fortunate enough to call her a friend for many years. Still I had not known much of what is contained in this book. We have all touched some kind of madness. We have all cast our own sorry, desperate type of spells. This book is a testament to those things which make us scared and brave and magically human all at once.”
—Conor Oberst
“’The past is never dead and not even past,’ the great Southern novelist William Faulkner wrote. In her evocative, elegant memoir, the great Southern songwriter and performer Orenda Fink is like a descendant of one of his characters transported to our time, surviving terrible circumstances and finally thriving.”
—Anne Kreamer, author of Going Gray
“Orenda Fink’s memoir is un-put-downable—it is a lyrical, compassionate, and complicated telling of the impacts of mental health and antagonism on multiple generations of a family. She brings a realistic and compelling lens to the confusing terrain of guilt, duty, grief, attachment, shame, and love that family members must navigate in these circumstances. It will validate the experience of so many survivors of these family systems.”
—Dr. Ramani Durvasula, New York Times Bestselling Author of It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, clinical psychologist, and professor emerita of psychology, California State University, Los Angeles
“A memoir of great generosity—to herself, to her mother, to all mothers, to her friends and fans, to everyone who reads it. You don’t have to know Orenda or her music in order to recognize a version of your own life inside of her own. Plus all the juicy music-scene gossip. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Alexander Payne
“Every paragraph of The Witch’s Daughter shimmers with a hauntingly precise perspective, and the spirit of the book is a delight, a wonder, even as it addresses turmoil, sadness, heartbreak. This is a riveting book about defiance. As Orenda seeks explanation for her mother's twisted magic and vindictive spells, she finds wisdom and serenity and music. The minute I finished the book, I wanted to start right over at the beginning.”
—Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief, The Titanic Survivors Book Club
“Orenda Fink’s band Azure Ray may have been deemed ‘whispercore,’ but The Witch’s Daughter builds to a howling, feral scream. Tracing her hand-to-mouth itinerant childhood through years of enduring a narcissistic abuser, Fink renders the surreal horror of life with her mother so potently, the reader yearns for each escape: She enters a collapsing world of major labels, becomes an indie star, and finds solitude in the desert. Her odyssey is intertwined with famous cameos, mounting tragedy, unraveling familial lies, and urgent questions: Is the difference between the spiritual and the scientific primarily semantic? And how can we unweave our abusers’ threads from the fabric of ourselves?”
—Chris Harding Thornton, author of Pickard County Atlas
Kirkus Reviews
2024-05-15
Confronting a mother’s madness.
Musician, songwriter, and performer Fink makes her book debut with an emotional memoir of her long struggle to wrest herself from her manipulative, destructive mother. Growing up, writes the author, “there was no comfort, only a sense of danger, of death, a fear of being swallowed alive, out of existence.” Although her father was gentle and caring, he could not protect his daughters—Fink and her older sister, Charlotte, and younger sister, Christine—from his wife’s madness and alcoholic rages, nor from the family’s financial straits. As an adult, Fink discovered that her mother fit the diagnosis of a particular borderline personality disorder archetype known as the Witch. Her mother proudly boasted she was a witch; reading about the disorder helped the author finally understand how it played out in reality. “What the literal witch and the borderline Witch have in common,” she writes, “is the unique ability to control those around them, not through physical force or the use of political leverage, but through the manipulation of the other’s mind.” Caught in her mother’s web, Fink spent 20 years trying to sever ties: “As fucked-up as it was, there was something comforting in the familiarity; her fear and sadness and mad ramblings were something I could lose myself in.” Thankfully, her mother had once given her a guitar, and Fink found an escape in music. She started a band with a friend, acquired a drummer, and got a record contract. Soon they were touring 300 days per year. The author recounts a successful international career, which contrasted with her tumultuous relationship with her mother and her desperate efforts to help her younger sister deal with her psychological and emotional wounds. Now living at peace in the California desert, Fink attests to hard-won survival.
A memorable book of raw, unvarnished recollections.
