There’s a particular kind of damage you can’t photograph. The kind that doesn’t show up on red carpets or mugshots. It creeps into the corners of lives — famous or not — and leaves a residue that’s hard to clean. It’s called inherited trauma, and trauma doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it rides in on war or poverty, but sometimes it’s hand-delivered by your mother or father, wrapped in gaslighting, manipulation, and control. Sometimes it whispers through generations, hiding behind family photos and holiday dinners, dressed up as duty, silence, or shame.  Welcome to the world of narcissistic parents, where you’re not a child — you’re an accessory. A trophy. Or worse, competition. For some, the roles are obvious: the golden child, the scapegoat. For others, the trauma is subtle, shapeshifting, dressed in matching outfits and forced smiles. The wound is real even when the audience claps.  Narcissistic parents don’t raise children. They raise extensions of themselves...

The Woman In Me is explosive. It is like dynamite, and a grenade had a baby and was launched into the atmosphere, illuminating some things that filled in  some  holes that were question marks while leaving others totally unanswered. The childhood portion was too long, and I sped through it, pausing at the eyebrow-raising parts, skipping over some descriptive parts, and finally switching to the audiobook. If I won't read Ernest Hemingway because I hate how fucking long he takes to get to the main point, I am not going to read through her talking about lying on warm rocks. His books are torturous for me, so I finally stopped, hitting the big titles and skipping others, but this was easy and short to listen to while doing other things.  It is an example of her telling her story and me reading between the lines. I begged to differ; ma'am, in some sections, she can get dreamy and escapist sometimes in others, like someone who is never really in reality and spends time in fugue...