How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir

$18.00

By Camille U. Adams


Tormented by her mother’s presence and haunted by her absence, Camille U. Adams gives a breathtaking account of survival and self-determination, reimagining the meaning of escape, its cost, and what comes after.

For generations, the women of Camille U. Adams’ family have left their daughters. Some follow the siren call of rum. Others flee from beatings behind closed doors, rushing into any arms that offer refuge. Some simply disappear. 

As a girl, Adams finds solace in Trinidad’s whispering fever grass, sweet ixora flowers, and the cradling branches of the rose mango tree—roots connecting her to the land’s long memory. But on Covigne Road, gunshots echo and men amass in doorways, their mouths and hands promising violation. Home offers no safety: just an explosive father, cowed sisters, and a mother whose only reprieve is manipulation. Cloying, suffocating, the maternal embrace threatens to blot out all else. Is it better to be choked or not to be held at all?

Mapping the fault lines between mother and child (humanity’s first and supposedly strongest bond), and with a poet’s Homeric vision of her native Trinidad, Adams’ astonishing debut weaves the Caribbean island’s history of colonial violence with her own family’s legacy of abandonment.

By Camille U. Adams


Tormented by her mother’s presence and haunted by her absence, Camille U. Adams gives a breathtaking account of survival and self-determination, reimagining the meaning of escape, its cost, and what comes after.

For generations, the women of Camille U. Adams’ family have left their daughters. Some follow the siren call of rum. Others flee from beatings behind closed doors, rushing into any arms that offer refuge. Some simply disappear. 

As a girl, Adams finds solace in Trinidad’s whispering fever grass, sweet ixora flowers, and the cradling branches of the rose mango tree—roots connecting her to the land’s long memory. But on Covigne Road, gunshots echo and men amass in doorways, their mouths and hands promising violation. Home offers no safety: just an explosive father, cowed sisters, and a mother whose only reprieve is manipulation. Cloying, suffocating, the maternal embrace threatens to blot out all else. Is it better to be choked or not to be held at all?

Mapping the fault lines between mother and child (humanity’s first and supposedly strongest bond), and with a poet’s Homeric vision of her native Trinidad, Adams’ astonishing debut weaves the Caribbean island’s history of colonial violence with her own family’s legacy of abandonment.

About the author

Camille U. Adams, PhD, is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her memoir, How to Be Unmothered, was recognized as a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2023. She earned her MFA in Poetry from City College, CUNY, and a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Florida State University. Honors for her work include Best of The Net: Nonfiction 2024, five nominations for the Pushcart Prize, three Best of the Net: Nonfiction nominations, and recognition for a notable essay in Best American Essays 2022. Among Adams' awarded fellowships are an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellowship, an inaugural Granta Nature Writing Workshop fellowship, an inaugural Anaphora Arts Italy Writing Retreat Fellowship, a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a Community of Writers Fellowship, and a Roots Wounds Words Fellowship. She is a Tin House alum and has received support from Kenyon Writers Workshop, VONA, and others. Adams served as a juried reader for Tin House, a creative nonfiction editor at Variant Lit, and an assistant editor at Split Lip Magazine and The Account. Her writing has been featured in Passages North, Citron Review, XRAY Literary Magazine, Variant Literature, The Forge Literary Magazine, Kweli Magazine, and elsewhere.

Book Details

Paperback ISBN: 9781632063953 • $18
Publication date: August 19, 2025
5.5" x 7.125" • 288 pages

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This book is published with the support of the Polish Book Institute Translation Grant.

Praise

“Camille U. Adams has written a truly astounding memoir that brings to light a portrait of cruelty that few others are willing to admit, and from which fewer still are able to break free. Little could have prepared me for how much I needed this book in my life right here and right now. I implore everyone read How to Be Unmothered for its uncompromising truths delivered with unmistakable beauty.”

— Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Children of the Land

“With a poet’s lyricism and an eye for detail, Camille U. Adams is an incredible talent. How to Be Unmothered is a work of art, an excavation of memory, a blend of fierce determination, vulnerability, and a journey toward liberation. It is painful, beautiful, haunting.” 

— Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls

“Camille U. Adams’ debut memoir focuses on the author’s passage from girlhood to womanhood and from Trinidad to Brooklyn, a harrowing journey made even more difficult by various abandonments from the very adults responsible for taking care of her. Adams breaks taboos by refusing to keep family secrets that protect the powerful. She is not afraid to write about the aftermath of her ‘unmothering.’ But this is not a record of one’s traumas. This book is a resistance—the reward of being brave enough to know the painful truth of one's own life. 

Each sentence is alive with poetry and bursts with the joy of survival; the voice of this writer is unique, indelible, and strong. 

In How to Be Unmothered, Adams shows us a path toward a better life can be made through stories. Instead of hiding, possibilities for intimacy, connection, and even love, come from being known. Read this book and then put it into the hands of someone you love who has ever felt abandoned as a child, by which I mean, any of us.”

— Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers