⭐⭐⭐⭐ Verified Purchase – How one terrified hypervigilant kid kept her wits, dignity, humor, and self-determination in the face of extreme parental mental illness and macho patriarchal bias to become one of San Francisco’s first female cops. Set against the equally bi-polar doped-up hippy heyday and the stiff shoulder pad, self-serving ‘80s, you’ll enjoy the page-turning adventure of how Officer Lynch broke free.
Lynch’s brisk, fluid writing style careens you through a surreal, peripatetic, and disjointed life that mirrors the episodic nature of her mother’s psychosis. I appreciated this aspect most of all. It gives the reader a true sense of the survivor’s dichotomy – the shocking, wary freedom each time one escapes family psychodrama that’s strangled by the guilt of abandoning loved ones despite their having abandoned you. So many children suffer under the weight of this war, but are subsumed by their parent’s disease, and never realize their potential. Even when they do, as in this tale, the childhood trauma imprints and sculpts who they become and how they triumph over societal injustice.