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Not Good Enough Girl: A Memoir of an Inconvenient Daughter

Adult; Memoir; (Market)

Beginning at the age of five, Sondra spends decades auditioning for the role of her authentic self. Her dazzling mother casts her as confidante and co-conspirator in her affairs and serial marriages. Her first stepfather grooms her for his pleasure. Sondra vacillates between fierce anger toward her mother—who did nothing to protect her from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—and a desperate need for her love and approval. Her mother never considered her poor choices in men and marriage were in any way her fault and she remained oblivious to the damaging repercussions. Before she finishes college, Sondra meets the kind of man her mother has taught her to attract and he casts her in the role of submissive wife. Sondra stays in the toxic marriage for twenty years, engaging in affairs with married men, rather than divorce. When therapy and AA propel her out of the sense-deadening haze of alcohol and cigarettes, she realizes she’s spent her entire life living as an extension of her mother. When she summons the courage to tell her husband she plans to leave, he says “You’re going to turn out just like your mother.” Sondra attempts to establish a separate and sober identity, and tensions further increase when she marries a man who displaces her mother as the epicenter of Sondra’s life. Her mother’s seventh marriage, which won’t be her last, comes to an end, and she tries to draw Sondra back into the chaos. After memories surface of her mother witnessing and allowing her stepfather to sexually abuse her, a seismic shift occurs, freeing Sondra from the need for maternal connection. But when her mother suffers a stroke, the potential aftershocks threaten to destroy Sondra’s happy life and loving marriage.
Reviews
“Mommy, who’s that man?” a daughter asks. “That’s your new father,” her mother responds. “He’s come to live with us.” With crisp prose and piercing insight, Brooks’s often devastating debut chronicles the whizzing chaos of life with an eight-times-married mother, a string of unsuitable fathers, and host of siblings, and toxic, co-dependent relationships. The story starts with Brooks’s childhood chronicled from experience with each of her mother’s husbands—“Being Dan’s favorite gave me a certain amount of protection. It also became a curse.” While some of these men seem relatively normal, others are abusive in a variety of ways, which Brooks recalls with brisk frankness. Pulsing underneath it all, though, is Brooks’s relationship with her mother and its evolution over the years, from admirer to confidante, hater to caregiver, with the adult Brooks striving to heal and understand the times she was left unprotected.

Readers are taken inside a fraught childhood, full of its little pleasures, familial pressures, fears, and censures. Readers should be mindful that the book contains descriptions of sexual abuse, with Brooks taking pains to capture the helplessness, and anger that such experiences trigger, while also going on to work through them: “What kind of mother lets a man inspect her daughter’s body that way?” she eventually shouts, a welcome burst of catharsis. The adult Brooks lives with a sense of foreboding: will she end up like her mother? She tries her best not to, but at times can’t help but feel she’s exhibiting traits she grew up around.

Fitting to its subject, this is no easy read, and the narrative can feel claustrophobic. But the author does a great job of taking readers into a difficult life, laying bare the people and traumas that made her who she is—and her sometimes frantic efforts to overcome it all. Still, she surveys her family’s “flawed humanity” with an empathetic eye but also a bracing, honest clarity. Healing and hope, here, are hard earned.

Takeaway: Devastating memoir of a mother’s many husbands and growing up unprotected.

Comparable Titles: Mary Manning’s Nobody will Believe You, Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-

Foreword Reviews

Not Good Enough Girl

A Memoir of an Inconvenient Daughter

Sondra R. Brooks
She Writes Press (Mar 4, 2025)
Softcover $17.99 (259pp)
978-1-64742-766-5

Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5

Not Good Enough Girl is a complex memoir about innocence interrupted.

Sondra R. Brooks’s riveting memoir Not Good Enough Girl is about family dysfunction, abuse, and addiction.

When Brooks was five, she began navigating her exposure to her mother’s affairs and serial marriages. Subjected to emotional parentification, she was her mother’s confidante and “accomplice,” often in attendance for her mother’s secret escapades. She teetered between her resentment toward her mother—who did not shield Brooks from her abusive stepfather—and affinity for her approval.

Brooks’s traumatic childhood manifested itself in her adulthood: She dealt with a broken marriage, extramarital affairs, recovery from substance abuse, and growing tensions with her mother. By way of therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous, she worked toward sobriety and healing. She was challenged to reexamine her relationship with her mother in the process and explored the complexities of severing a relationship that was once the center of her life.

The book’s “present recollections of experiences over time” are such that “some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.” Its memories represent seismic surfacing and revision as they are processed and reprocessed, resulting in intimacy. And while the storytelling is chronological, its instances of introspection appear in a more unconventional style, with the voices of Brooks’s younger and present selves overlapping: the latter voice is delicate, and the former sharper and less forgiving. Light moments also factor in, as with an observation about her Aunt Lu: “She’d recently been married, but technically only for about an hour, to a man named Charles, whose face could well represent that of an oyster.”

Italicized thoughts interrupt the narration at times to air and validate feelings that could not be dealt with in the moment, as with “I wanted to scream that I was only thirteen years old, for god’s sake. Leave me be for a while. Give me time to somehow emerge from this convoluted mass of emotional hell.” Early stories are often resolved in later chapters, once the necessary context and family history has been processed, as with the revelation that Brooks’s mother experienced emotional neglect as a child, which impacted her own parenting choices. Still, although Brooks once held hope for “an untapped reserve of love and nurture” found within her mother, the book’s conclusions more reflect weary acceptance of faults in others that Brooks cannot herself fix: “I will not contort reality because it hurts my heart less to believe a lie.”

A complex memoir about innocence interrupted.

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