About The Book
the journey of a broken child is the debut memoir by American author and surgeon, Kelley Wear. It is a tale of overcoming the paralyzing effects of toxic shame and beating the odds by learning to trust one’s own life. Through her own story and that of her brother Maury, Dr. Wear demonstrates how love’s power to heal transcends death and time.
The memoir introduces a paradigm shift away from the highly stigmatizing and grim statistics of the after-effects of severe childhood trauma to an empowering freedom and power that can be enjoyed by every person who has experienced similar circumstances and can ultimately be shared with others to transform much of the suffering around us. Given that more than one in five people have endured childhood abuse, Dr. Wear’s work is revolutionary and current.
Experiencing a troubled and abusive childhood at the height of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, the book begins with young Kelley trying to kill her infant brother, Peter. She spends the first half of her life wanting to die. The family eventually moves to a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee where she nearly succeeds at the age of twenty-four. After she is found following a drug overdose, she decides that she wants to survive.
At around the same time, her other brother Maury learns that he has contracted HIV. Because of his sexual orientation, Maury is so ostracized by his community that he keeps it a secret. The book reconstructs Maury’s life and his attempts at surviving from day to day while carrying such a heavy psychological burden under the radar of his family and community. Maury’s story poignantly illustrates the debilitating consequences of homophobia that is not easily paralleled in other literary works.
By sharing glimpses of the lives of her parents and grandparents, the book goes beyond an ordinary memoir to demonstrate the historical roots of toxic shame and how its paralyzing impact gets passed through generations.
the journey of a broken child brings the reader full circle, ending as Kelley, now a surgeon is holding her own infant daughter in Queens, New York shortly after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center of 2001. Behind them, the sky is black and the air pungent from the burning of the twin towers. She stands in the middle of an abandoned street in Astoria not knowing whether her husband, Larry is alive. But when she looks into little Kassidy’s face, there is a surreal juxtaposition to the black surroundings. Kassidy looks lovingly back at her mother, the light of all of the goodness of the universe shining forth from her eyes. In this little beam of immaculate brightness in her arms, Kassidy emanates the brilliant power of all of life. And the world is good.
This book illustrates how toxic shame impacts both Kelley and Maury in starkly different ways. It ultimately manifested into a tremendous source of spiritual power for both of them. For Kelley, this was achieved once everything in her world that was important to her began literally falling apart. Through the complete chaos, she realizes that she can trust her life enough to become truly authentic and fully embrace her past. For Maury, his compassion in life had the power to heal ten years after his death after Kelley made the fascinating discovery of a letter that he had written to her in 1986.