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Reviewed by Romuald Dzemo for Readers' Favorite
Life with Less of Me by Julianna Burmesch is a memoir that follows the author’s life from a childhood with parents prone to hoarding, emotional abuse, and alcoholism. The book starts in 2019, when fifty-eight-year-old Julianna sorts through her mother’s rooms and describes the suffocating legacy of dysfunction left by her meek mother and tyrannical father. The book then delivers a chronological account of the author’s struggles, from being left in a skeet-shooting bar when she was just three to decades of trauma, struggles as a wife, medical emergencies, and challenges as an educator and a mother. The memoir accelerates with grave illnesses that strip her in a way that reflects the metaphor in the title, referring to her shrinking body that is battered by surgery, necrotizing fasciitis, and cancer.
Julianna Burmesch’s memoir is her gripping story of surviving family chaos, as she gives readers a child’s-eye view of domestic terror without falling into self-pity. The voice then changes to that of an adult who reflects on trauma and how it steals one’s joy and hijacks one’s nervous system long after the escape. I enjoyed the age-based approach to chapters, which defines the rhythm of the memoir. You meet a young girl who went under a coffee table in fear, but who now becomes a mother terrified of repeating the same cycle of dysfunction in her own home. Life with Less of Me is a compelling meditation on inner-child work, therapy, and how the love of a husband can help bring clarity, especially when one’s past still sneaks up on her. She writes with grace and clarity about the body’s memory of trauma and the effort required to break generational patterns.
