Every generation swears the cycle ends with them. She stopped the beatings. That part she got right. But the wound changed shape and traveled through her family anyway.

It was in the house before Deborah was born. It moved when the family moved. New town, new school, new church, new everything. It lived in her mother's temper, switching on and off with no warning, and it turned even the chore lists into weapons. Before she was old enough for school, it had divided her mind into pieces to carry the weight.

It did not stay in her childhood. It followed her into a marriage. Three children before she was twenty, psychiatric ward bracelets not long after. In one of those wards, a doctor finally named the dividing: multiple personality disorder, known today as dissociative identity disorder. The book goes into those wards with her: what the rooms are like from the inside. Getting out meant risking her own life and her children's by betting everything on nothing. From poverty to prosperity and almost all the way back again. She kept starting over, building things with her own two hands, watching them come down, building again. And the wound kept up. Years later it walked into her counseling office wearing her clients' faces: the difficult patient had become a licensed professional mental health counselor, and she knew the file from both sides of the desk.

Its newest shape is silence. Two of her three grown children no longer speak to her. This book is addressed to all three of them, and she knows the rest of us are reading over their shoulders. Boomer to Gen X to Millennial — the wound has taken a different shape in each generation.

People believe an abused child grows out of it. Falling Together is one whole life, on paper, showing what "growing out of it" looks like. One woman laying it all out on the floor like evidence: what was done to her, what she did, what it cost. Funny in the wrong places. Honest past the point of comfort.

This is the story of how she fell — and how,
against considerable odds, she kept falling together.