At the age of 18, I ran away from the rural South and cut contact with my entire family. I fled halfway across the country and began college as a first generation, low income college student. I legally changed my name, found solace in writing, and grafted roots through my chosen family. I will never reconcile with my ex-family. Yet, I have been told by survivors and non-estranged people over and over that I would never heal if I didn’t forgive my abusive parents. I believe that forgiveness isn’t essential in my healing journey; escape was.
Approximately a quarter of Americans are estranged from at least one relative, yet the topic of cutting ties remains largely taboo. Oprah released two episodes addressing estrangement as a trend, despite exiters and experts identifying how calling it a trend is dangerous. When healthy relationships are missing from one’s family, the ticket for safety may be through estrangement. After leaving an abusive relationship (whether familial or otherwise) establishing agency is one of the most healing acts.
As someone who has been estranged from her entire family for 13 years, I longed for narratives that mirrored my own: that it was possible to flee family and build a better life away from abuse. As social discourse surrounding estrangement has become inflamed, my hope is that our narratives reduce the stigma of family estrangement.
I’m sick of how child abuse victims are silenced or told repeatedly to forgive and reconcile with harmful parents. My life’s mission is to destigmatize those of us who choose safety over family. Estrangement is a spectrum. It can arise from one or many reasons, such as abuse, religion, addiction, mental illness, politics, as well as forced separation due to war and other human rights violations. While many estranged relationships hover around low contact or cordial contact, I am interested in child abuse survivors who—like me—found solace in complete estrangement. These 10 books explore what happens when survival is only possible through estrangement.
What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
Journalist and radio producer Stephanie Foo, in her debut and New York Times bestselling memoir, utilizes a braided narrative to explore her experience surviving childhood abuse alongside investigative reporting on Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (cPTSD).
Foo interweaves personal narrative alongside transcripts from therapy, interviews with psychologists, in-depth visualizations during EMDR, and anecdotes of hope to portray the mental health impact of familial abuse. Foo grapples with a childhood shaped by cognitive dissociation from abuse, posing the question of what relationship can an adult have with their abusive parent.
Acceptance by Emi Nietfeld
This bildungsroman memoir follows an “e” structure: The book begins with Nietfeld dreading telling her mother that she is engaged, follows the journey of her traumatic childhood of abuse and neglect, then reconnects at the starting point of the “e” by telling of the engagement, then details her low and no contact with her parents. Nietfeld’s background as a journalist and speaker informs the craft of her book in its approach of addressing both the intimate (her own experiences) and the epic (systematic abuse of children in foster care, classism, racism, poverty, and homelessness).
Acceptance rejects the hero’s journey, although Nietfeld’s journey is one which portrays conventional success: graduating from Harvard and landing a high profile tech job, she reflects on how one need not be successful in order to be worthy of help. Emotionally evocative scenes restructure society’s concept of what resilience and success truly mean.
Made in China by Anna Qu
Anna Qu’s debut memoir follows a coming of age journey of her experience being abused and neglected at home, reporting her mother to Child Protective Services for forcing her to be a sweat factory worker as a child, and then her journey through college and unhealthy work environments as she navigates estrangement. This book is set in New York City, Wenzhou, and Xi’an.
The publication of Made in China swiveled Qu’s low contact with her mother into one of complete estrangement. At the Los Angeles AWP, Qu spoke on a panel about how estrangement was the best outcome from the book, and she’s now working on an essay collection about estrangement. Books are living creatures and their impact is often outside of the control of their author’s hands. In this case, the love and labor of the book amounted to better safety of the estranged author.
How to be Unmothered by Camille U Adams
This lyric memoir was a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. The perspective of the child’s voice is written in parallel with the adult voice as narrator. This exquisite blending of narrative voices on the same page reckons with the compassion for a child experiencing abuse alongside an adult narrator holding an abusive parent accountable. The memoir grapples with how unmothering is a choice an abusive and neglectful parent makes, so that estrangement becomes necessary for the child’s survival.
Adams explores multiple names to demonstrate the emotional distance to one’s estranged mother: not-mother, my mother, unmothered, Mummy, this-mother, a mother, this woman, and Soucouyant. The prose refuses to pander to the white gaze by instead rooting colloquialisms, staccato sentences, humorous rhyming, exclusion of quotation marks in dialogue, and by weaving Trinidadian oral storytelling traditions. The audiobook, recorded by Adams herself, is just as captivating.
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
This winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing covers an expansive amount of time from the author’s young childhood surviving abuse, deliberating in her 30s to undergo surgeries, becoming married, and participating in a Fulbright fellowship in the Philippines. All this information is mapped out in the blurb. The book includes scans of photographs, letters, and migration paperwork.
Estrangement is not a main theme; a complete cutting off occupies only a few pages. This book is a testament to how family bonds can be strengthened when abusers are held accountable. Although Talusan waited until most of the elders in her family had passed before writing and sharing these memories, she felt compelled to write this book after she became an aunt and held her niece for the first time: “I realized how dangerous it was to protect the wrong people by telling only the happy stories.”
Saving Five by Amanda Nguyen
Astronaut and advocate Amanda Nguyen’s bestseller employs a braided structure: 1, the aftermath of rape at Harvard and having to extend her anonymous rape kit every six months, then choosing between her career and justice; and 2, the mystical journey of her multiple selves at ages 5, 15, 22, and 30 as they seek answers via memories.
The way survivors tell narratives is an act of agency. Estrangement wasn’t a primary focus; instead it provided enough context to understand the further isolation in how one who is abused once is more likely to be abused, or assaulted, again. Although the majority of the book grapples with the way that rape and assault victims are responsible for the crime committed on their body, there are brief references of Nguyen’s parental estrangement scattered throughout the book and how she could never return home, as what happened at home was far worse.
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
The moment I saw this controversial title for the first time, I immediately understood that the author must be a survivor of childhood abuse. McCurdy crafts this memoir by stitching together brief chapters (most chapters typically range one to five pages long). The voice remains within the perspective of the narrator’s age as she grows up; this faithfully represents the lived experience of how a child can internalize blame in order to appease an abusive and enmeshed mother. The memoir’s appeasing voice at times turns scathing and highly self-critical, in a way which dismantles the myth of the perfect victim.
The book explores how the harmful impacts of one’s abusive family member may not become clear until adulthood. When an inevitable estrangement happens, McCurdy weaves a family member’s relentless gaslighting against her firm boundary, repeated, until enough is enough. This scene was a powerful lesson on how to protect yourself.
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
In the prologue, Walls is riding a taxi in Manhattan feeling overdressed when she sees her mother diving in a dumpster. She hadn’t seen her mother in months and sank down, determined not to be noticed before asking the taxi driver to turn around and take her home. A few pages later, in the first chapter, readers learn that Walls’ first memory is being on fire—at age three. The book traces a childhood of growing up with delusional parents, navigating the desperation which couples with hunger, and growing up too early. As a high schooler, the narrator sharply reminds her mother of how she’s failing basic responsibilities, and after being rebuked, Walls snaps, “If you wanted to be treated like a mother, you should act like one.”
No Contact edited by Jenny Bartoy
Without family, who are we? No Contact is the first anthology about family estrangement. This book, released April 2026, is urgent in destigmatizing social discourse surrounding estrangement. Each of the 32 stories or poems grapple with the spectrum of estrangement. Most reject the easy social narrative of familial reconciliation. The book includes writers such as Cheryl Strayed, Deesha Philyaw, Domenica Ruta, noam keim, Erika Krouse, Jane Wong, and Monique Laban. This anthology delves into the grossly underrepresented stories of life after estrangement: grieving a living person, longing for one’s hometown or mother tongue, the joy and safety after cutting ties, breaking the cycle of abuse through reparenting, and relishing chosen family instead. An anthology of this magnitude is feasible because of the skillful weaving of its editor, Jenny Bartoy, and her narrative influenced by her own familial estrangement.
Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah
Mah made her debut with this international bestselling memoir in 1997. This classic bildungsroman opens each chapter with an idiom in Chinese, then weaves time, dialogue, and scenes from Shanghai, Tianjin, Hong Kong, London, and California. Dedicated to “all unwanted children,” Mah donated millions of dollars through the proceeds of the Falling Leaves Foundation to students in Beijing, Shanghai, and Irvine. I first read this book as a high schooler plotting for 1,244 days to escape my abusive family. It installed hope that even if my ex-parents hated me, I could dream of a better future without them.
Though Falling Leaves doesn’t use the word estrangement, the relationship between the author and her father and stepmother are rooted in estrangement and abandonment, long before society claimed estrangement was a “trend.” I wonder: How many books published prior to 2000 were rooted in estrangement without ever using that term?
