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At 50, an aspiring writer confronts painful challenges in her past and present.

Fingersh’s memoir weaves together three topics—memories of her younger brother’s mental illness and death at 26, her bitter sense of failure and struggle to reconnect with her lost promise, and the serious health problems that emerge for her 18-year-old daughter during her freshman year of college. From the start, our ability to get into her account is hampered by her self-presentation, which alternates between dramatic intensity and not-that-funny self-deprecation. On the first page of the first chapter, for example, she announces, “For almost twenty years, I thought I’d been a pretty great parent. But in the past several months, I’d ventured into new and ugly territory—so ugly that it was polluting my psyche, so shameful I hadn’t told a soul.” Did she murder someone? No, actually, she felt pangs of jealousy when her daughter scored a cool internship. Putting this inner torment about her lost potential as a writer in the foreground of a book-length memoir creates a somewhat off-putting focus on how the sausage gets made. Repeatedly telling us that she is a cliche (“ I am a walking cliché,” “I was like a literal cliché,” etc.) doesn’t help. Fingersh admires people with great chosen names, like Cheryl Strayed, Bob Dylan, and Lady Gaga, but won’t change hers: “Personal principle,” she explains. “Self-deprecation had grown around my bad last name like a birthmark.” Like a birthmark that grows, perhaps. The more effective storylines in the book are the moving, carefully told narratives involving her brother and daughter, where Fingersh is able to push her fraught self-concept to the side a bit. Fortunately, it all makes sense in the end, thanks to revelations found in EMDR therapy.

If you do what the title asks, which takes fortitude at times, the ending is uplifting.