Stepping Back from the Ledge

Starred review from February 28, 2022
Trujillo, a managing editor at USA Today, reexamines the events that led to her mother’s suicide in this gorgeous and elegiac debut. Though her mother historically struggled with depression, Trujillo was nevertheless shocked when she jumped off a cliff in the Grand Canyon in 2012. Dissatisfied with the cut-and-dried police reports, the author, a veteran writer, reporter, and editor, set out to find her own answers. As she lucidly traces recollections of her mother from childhood, what surfaces alongside them are trenchant memories of Trujillo’s own suffering—namely, the countless times she was raped as a teenager by her mother’s second husband. Trujillo kept silent about the abuse until she was 40, when, with the help of a psychologist, she shared her story with her mother (her mother’s death followed several months after the revelation, leaving Trujillo to agonize over whether “it was my fault”). Never once reaching for pat metaphors or an easy conclusion, Trujillo recounts her wrenching path to healing and how she held her family together during unimaginable grief. In the process, she offers an aching and stunning portrait of her fallible but loving mother, a woman who “started fires in the bathroom trash,” but with whom Trujillo’s identity is inextricably entwined. This shines a humanizing light on a subject too often relegated to the shadows.