Harare Review of Books

240 pp. August 19, 2025, Restless Books. Non-fiction/memoir.

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I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like Camille U. Adams’s prose poetry memoir. Lots of books are called poetic, or lyrical; but when you read How to be Unmothered, you’ll find out how completely it redefines those terms.

This is a story of a mother and her daughter: how she abandoned her child, not once but countless times, both physically and emotionally—and in all of the ways that matter. It’s the story of broken families and evil and still somehow absent fathers, of abuse and trauma echoing across generations. It’s the story, too, of how family members gang up against their weakest even as they protect those who cause the most harm—the hypocrisy of church folk. It’s the searing indictment of a wounded child.

The style that Adams has chosen to write in is striking for how much it occludes as it reveals: This is not a direct assault on her mother, and it aches with a daughter’s need to tell her own story without humiliating her mother or airing the family’s dirty laundry. And yet the daughter is compelled to speak, her anger palpable. And speak she does, in words full of rhythm and pain.

A bruise and a wound. Read with care—both for the author and yourself if these things may trigger your own memories of hurt. I have been throughly mothered, and my heart aches for Adams… But reader, she does not need my pity. It’s clear by the end of this book that she has found her way, and that she stands strong and tall, defiantly alive, still here. In a recollection so painful, it feels like this is what matters; that in the end, this is what counts.

Thank you to Restless Books for an e-galley in exchange for a review.

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I am twenty years old. And there are times ahead of me wherein for shelter, for documentation, for food this mother controls access to—just like the husband who she chose does do—I will be forced to tell this woman I love you. But, in the new uncle’s jeep, on this day that we finally reach, it’s the last time this obligatory speech will ever be true.