THE WITCH'S DAUGHTER

Confronting a mother’s madness.

Musician, songwriter, and performer Fink makes her book debut with an emotional memoir of her long struggle to wrest herself from her manipulative, destructive mother. Growing up, writes the author, “there was no comfort, only a sense of danger, of death, a fear of being swallowed alive, out of existence.” Although her father was gentle and caring, he could not protect his daughters—Fink and her older sister, Charlotte, and younger sister, Christine—from his wife’s madness and alcoholic rages, nor from the family’s financial straits. As an adult, Fink discovered that her mother fit the diagnosis of a particular borderline personality disorder archetype known as the Witch. Her mother proudly boasted she was a witch; reading about the disorder helped the author finally understand how it played out in reality. “What the literal witch and the borderline Witch have in common,” she writes, “is the unique ability to control those around them, not through physical force or the use of political leverage, but through the manipulation of the other’s mind.” Caught in her mother’s web, Fink spent 20 years trying to sever ties: “As fucked-up as it was, there was something comforting in the familiarity; her fear and sadness and mad ramblings were something I could lose myself in.” Thankfully, her mother had once given her a guitar, and Fink found an escape in music. She started a band with a friend, acquired a drummer, and got a record contract. Soon they were touring 300 days per year. The author recounts a successful international career, which contrasted with her tumultuous relationship with her mother and her desperate efforts to help her younger sister deal with her psychological and emotional wounds. Now living at peace in the California desert, Fink attests to hard-won survival.

A memorable book of raw, unvarnished recollections.