A detailed memoir of a childhood and adolescence marked by the effects of bullying.

In 1962, Forster, the second of her parents’ eight children, was 7 years old and had already lived in “four towns, two states, and six houses that I could remember.” Her father was a retail salesman who constantly switched jobs as he worked his way up the corporate ladder. Now it was time for another move, a cross-country road trip from Georgia to her birthplace of Washington state. Forster writes that she had one bully in her life: her older brother. Their relationship was “a reluctant marriage of playmates and antagonists,” she says, noting that over time, his physical and verbal jabs became more hostile and painful. When the family settled in Longview, Washington, Forster was enrolled at St. Rose, a Catholic school, where she met another boy who taunted her incessantly about her weight. Neither Forster’s parents nor her teachers appreciated the emotional damage she suffered, she says; she had fantasies of Tarzan sweeping in to whisk her away from the verbal assaults. Eventually, she found new strategies for dealing with her bully by ignoring him, effectively building a protective emotional wall: “I was proving that he could not reach me. It took me a long time to realize that no one else would be able to either.” This work is packed with vivid vignettes from Forster’s fantasy life alongside real-life moments in her childhood. The latter occasionally go on too long, but they ably capture the life of a young girl seeking escape. At 16, she scored placement as a yearlong foreign exchange student in New Zealand, where she was warmly embraced by a supportive family. In this section, her stories become buoyant and filled with interesting cultural tidbits. Readers may be as pleasantly surprised, as a gregarious, popular, and socially adept teenager emerges out of the shell she’d carefully constructed. (Includes occasional black-and-white drawings by the author.)

An eloquent remembrance delivered with visceral emotion.