My recent narrative nonfiction takes the reader on a vivid journey to the past—a childhood in Detroit flush against a vast wooded land teeming with life behind my house in which I escaped some harsh realities of family life in the 1970s. The story reads like fiction with powerful descriptions and imagery, carrying readers through both a beautiful and a difficult childhood where earth-shattering family secrets erupt and leave me splayed open and wondering “Who am I?” “What is the meaning of family?” The reader will ponder identity, answer essential questions of how we become the person we are, and determine to live with acceptance and purpose as we decide what to do with the new-found knowledge of once-hidden truth. One can stay broken, or one can pick up the pieces and construct something new.