“If you find yourself reliving unpleasant moments with the clarity you wish you could reserve for joy, that’s trauma,” writes Kristen Millares Young in “Desire Lines” (out Oct. 6 from Red Hen Press), her first memoir.
The book traces her path from growing up in a privileged and abusive Florida household run by Cuban exiles to making a home and a writing life in Seattle for the past 22 years, starting as a staff reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Since then, she has penned an award-winning novel, “Subduction,” co-founded a nonprofit newsroom, taught writing locally and nationally, and served as an erudite moderator for countless high-profile literary events.
If a desire line is a path that emerges “eroded yet unforeseen, next to the routes that were planned for us,” as Millares Young writes, this book does not walk that route alone. Millares Young infuses her search for self-actualization with quotes from a wide range of feminist thinkers, from Adrienne Rich to Audre Lorde to Kate Zambreno. Whether interviewing sex workers in Cuba or researching a pagan mother goddess cult while investigating her own family history in Spain, Millares Young searches for kinship among those who reject the strictures of traditional womanhood. In this sense, her quest for freedom emerges as part of a lineage of resistance: “On the far side of silence, I suspect, is joy,” she writes.