Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways: A Memoir

by Brittany Means

Overview

"I can't write a story about myself as the sad, quiet child of two drug addicts. That's not how it was, even when it was. To me, sleeping in the car was normal. Better, it was comfy and fun. I loved my bed made of clothes inside a trash bag that I sank into slowly like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family movie... I loved the motels and their swimming pools and trashy daytime TV channels... Nobody could tell us what to do." Brittany Means's childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. Riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany didn't care where they were going -- to a roadside midwestern motel, a shelter, or The Barn in Indiana, the cluttered mansion her Pentecostal grandparents called home -- as long as they were together. But every so often, her mom would surprise her -- and leave. As Brittany grew older and questioned her own complicated relationships and the poverty, abuse, and instability that enveloped her, she began to recognize that hell wasn't only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the cycle of violence that entrapped her family. Through footholds such as horror movies, neuropsychology, and strong bonds, Brittany makes sense of this cycle and finds a way to leave it. While untangling the web of her most painful memories, Brittany crafts a tale of self-preservation, resilience, and hope with a unique narrative style -- a sparkling example of the human ability to withstand the most horrific experiences and still thrive. -- Front jacket flap.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781958506554
Publisher:	Zibby Publishing
Publication date:	05/07/2024
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Brittany Means is a writer and editor living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A graduate of Iowa’s MFA Nonfiction Writing Program, Means has received several awards for her work, including the Magdalena Award and the Grace Paley Fellowship. Her other talents include doing horror movie screams and baking ugly but delicious cakes.

Editorial Reviews

Brittany Means has pieced together the shards of a devastating childhood in this powerful memoir. It’s gut-wrenching but at the same time triumphant, harrowing yet exquisitely told. Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways is a story of survival that left me choked up and cheering.”
–Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle

“Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways will change the way readers understand what, and if anything, actually survives our childhoods. What is a parent? But the book's lasting impact might be what it demands of the memoir genre. Brittany Means has, at once, created the most readable and the most psychologically rigorous book I've read in decades. I needed the reminder that art can do this.”
–Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“There are all kinds of memoirs, but some should be read by every person who ever thinks to write or read one. Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways makes that list. What Brittany Means accomplishes on the page, telling the truth of her own life, the brutality and beauty of it, with the prose of a recovering poet, is often attempted and rarely successful. This memoir is a success all the way down.”
–Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody's Daughter

“Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways is a memoir that balances a real generosity for the self, a real generosity for the world the self existed and exists in, but it is still sharp, stark, honest, and operates with an enviable clarity. The writing expands lived emotions that people often flatten: sadness, fear, pleasure. Within that expansion, a reader is offered an entire universe.”
–Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America

“So vivid is the writing, that at moments, I had to look up from this memoir and remind myself that I was not in the car with Brittany Means. . . . With heart-wrenching honesty, Means explores and reveals the violence that afflicts many children today. Her first-hand account is a testament to the resilience of children, but also a revealing telling that calls us to account as a country and people where too many children fall through the cracks in their profound suffering.”
–David Ambroz, author of A Place Called Home

“Brilliantly paced, impeccably written, and truly moving, Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways is storytelling at its most powerful and most vulnerable; through each scene of brutality and betrayal, Brittany Means shows us the extraordinary lengths we often must go to find humanity, forgiveness, and trust.”
–Susan Steinberg, author of Machine

"This book is an outstanding debut…A harrowing and soulful memoir to be read, savored, and reread."
–Kirkus Reviews (starred)

From the Publisher

06/10/2024

Means's rawly told memoir traces her unstable childhood, marked by road trips alongside her mother, who was escaping from one relationship and bad situation to another. She remembers that she never cared where they were going, only that her mother was with her. That is, until her mother would disappear, leaving her with her evangelical Christian grandparents in Indiana. This self-narrated memoir is a powerful story of an adult coming to terms with her abuse-filled, nomadic childhood, striving to break free from generational trauma and forge a path forward. Means's nuanced narration allows her to share her memories and communicate a full range of emotions. Despite the many heavy moments she relates, she finds a way to be hopeful. It is clear that, while these events will always be a part of who she is, storytelling and sharing have allowed her to start taking control of her narrative. VERDICT A heartbreaking yet uplifting memoir of a woman recovering from past wounds and embracing healing and hope. For readers of Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle.—Elyssa Everling

Library Journal - Audio

★ 2023-07-06
A potent reflection on emerging from a nomadic youth marked by trauma into an adulthood containing stability and tenderness.

Means’ childhood was punctuated by drives with her mother, journeys between places that were not quite homes and that took them out of and into abusive situations. The author’s devotion to her mother is the centrifugal force of this exceptionally crafted memoir. The author chronicles her mother’s favorite songs, quirks, chain-smoking, and days full of sleep, and she investigates the deleterious effects of her family’s Pentecostal traditions. “The only thing I dreaded more than being alive was going to hell,” writes Means, who writes vividly about “the barn,” which her grandparents built to accommodate their hoarding, and her half brother’s movement in and out of their lives. The author’s recollections of her youth tumble out in a series of artful vignettes, some almost hypnotic, revealing tumultuous relationships, addictions, and abuse just as a child might come to understand them, gradually and in retrospect, rather than immediately or chronologically. The countless blows—physical, psychological, and spiritual—that Means endured at the hands of people (including her mother) who were supposed to care for her are not easy to read about, but her reckoning with both the events and what they mean for her own, emerging identity is honest, graceful, and disarming. “When you can’t tell your own account, can’t exorcize it, it can get stuck inside you,” she writes. As Means brings hazy memories into focus for herself and readers, she constructs a method of thinking about, owning, and releasing her past as well as a fresh way of writing about personal trauma that both acknowledges victimhood and resists the simplicity of sensationalism and pity. This book is an outstanding debut that finds resolution while also leaving plenty of intriguing themes to explore in her future work.

A harrowing and soulful memoir to be read, savored, and reread.

Kirkus Reviews