Home by Amy Smyth Miller

Home: A Memoir of Family, Forgiveness & Healing will be published by Atmosphere Press on September 15th, 2026. It is available for preorder.

Dear Amy Smyth Miller,

For a short period of time in my teenage years, my mind blocked out memories made within a nine-to-12-month period. I was unable to recall a hospitalization, a car crash, or what author John Green calls “the night feeling” in his collection The Anthropocene Reviewed — an overwhelming sense of dread that flooded my mind and body until I awoke the next morning.

In your memoir Home: A Memoir of Family, Forgiveness & Healing, you write, “I would come to understand that complex post-traumatic stress disorder was, in essence, a disorder of memory” (9). 

While my therapist and psychiatrist at the time did not believe this lapse in memory was connected to a form of PTSD, I do question not what caused my forgetting, but rather what brought it back. Your story of healing through therapy and self-inquiry has brought new light to my own experiences.

You write, “‘I don’t remember any of that, Clare.’ She was incredulous. It had been completely wiped from my memory.

I have never recovered that memory. It troubled me that there were missing pieces of my past that I couldn’t retrieve” (131).

In the summer of 2018, my neighbor-turned-friend Micah sat with me in my backyard. Micah and I discussed our respective battles with mental illness. I confessed to him that I couldn’t recall almost an entire year’s worth of memories. He shared a similar story of him forgetting a shorter, but still troubling, amount of time. 

“Do you think it’s your brain protecting you?” he asked.

I hadn’t thought about it that way — that something I believed was a fault of my brain was actually it trying to survive. 

I think this is what links us — that life, our minds, and our bodies want to persist; blocking out negative and possibly disturbing memories is what allows us to continue. The hard work is getting those memories back and being able to deal with them.

“‘But what if I don’t remember any good ones, I think they’re all bad?’” (9). 

My parents — specifically my father — tell me that as I age, I will start forgetting the feelings of uneasiness or discomfort I experienced in my adolescence. But often in conversations with my parents, when I am prompted to recall events or memories associated with a specific place, the answers I give are along the lines of: “I don’t remember x, y, or z, but I do remember being in a poor mood.”

After recovering the year or so I’d blocked out, it became difficult for me to look on the bright side of my memory during that time. Almost all the positives had somehow become associated with negative feelings or moments.

Just as you imagine taking in your child-self and leading her to a sun-soaked wall and healing together, I imagine taking out my 13-year-old self’s ponytail and letting the hair touch the back of her neck. I braid her hair — something I couldn’t do for myself — and hug her. I hand her a trowel and tell her to dig her hands into the soil in the backyard of our parents’ house. I pull weed after weed with her and check each other’s legs for ticks. I tell her that we are okay. Not perfect, but okay. That we can manage things a little better now, and that she has so much life left to live. 

Thank you for your memoir. It has truly and profoundly shaped my own healing journey, and I am sure it will do the same for others.

Very sincerely,

Carlin Steere