Mommy Issues - by Laura Quick (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Laura Quick was born outside of Savannah, Georgia, where centuries-old oaks draped in Spanish moss stand watch and history lingers on every cobblestone street. But instead of an antebellum mansion, Laura came home to a single-wide trailer, the daughter of a seventeen-year-old mother who would soon leave her behind, sign away custody, and start a new life.

Some people inherit their grandmother's china. Laura inherited a mother who drifted in and out of her life, leaving her caught between the thrill of finally being chosen and the shame of never being enough to make her stay. The highs looked like joyrides with the windows down, Prince's Kiss on the radio, and marsh air whipping through their hair. The lows looked like her own mother becoming the first person to offer her drugs before she made it to middle school. Laura inherited generational trauma, a family full of secrets, and an alarming ability to mistake survival for healing.

With equal parts wit and vulnerability, Laura gives voice to the stories families learn to whisper, writing about addiction, abuse, poverty, shame, faith, and generational trauma. She recounts the marriages she was certain would fix her, the spectacularly bad decisions she somehow survived, the motherhood she was terrified she'd get wrong, and the long, messy work of becoming someone different than the people who raised her.

Heartbreaking, hilarious, and deeply hopeful, Mommy Issues explores the complicated and often painful dynamics of family, the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and what it takes to break the patterns we inherit. Because while our past may explain us, it never gets to define us.

About the Author

Laura Quick is the founder and CEO of Good Grit magazine, a quarterly periodical focusing on southern culture that she launched in 2014, and its subsidiary, Good Grit Agency, a creative agency she founded in 2019. Primarily distributed across the lower 12 states, Good Grit has a boutique readership of 300,000. Laura co-founded her second company, Hatch Strategies, a digital marketing tech firm, in 2020. She also established local nonprofit initiatives, including the Dream Different Project, which provides beds for children in need, and the women's empowerment group Les Dames of Cullman. A lifelong writer and reader, she lives on Smith Lake in north Alabama.