Rachel Alexander is a memoirist who writes about the things people are usually more comfortable leaving unnamed.

Her work lives somewhere between memory and the body. She writes without apology about family, power, grief, survival, and what remains after the thing that was supposed to break you fails to finish the job. She has little interest in neat endings, inspirational bows, or the comforting lie that everything happens for a reason.

Rachel grew up in New Jersey between a broken home and a broken family: her divorced parents, Larry and Edele, and her sister, Shayna. None of them were safe.

She learned early that survival can become more than something you do; if you’re not careful, it becomes who you are. Much of her writing begins there, in the uneasy distance between what happened, what we remember, and what the body refuses to forget.

She has lived an unreasonable number of lives: teacher, lover, vagabond, executive, dominatrix, patient, daughter, volunteer, idiot, and, occasionally, no one at all. She has been very good at some of them.

These days, Rachel lives in a dollhouse with her cat, writing through the wreckage and building a life of intentional solitude in defiance of nearly everything she was told she should want, should need, or should become.

She does not promise a lesson at the end.