The Witch's Daughter

“Fink reckons with her mother’s mental illness and addiction, conjuring her own healing.” -Vanity Fair

“‘The past is never dead and not even past, ’ the great Southern novelist William Faulkner wrote. In her evocative, elegant memoir, the great Southern songwriter and performer Orenda Fink is like a descendant of one of his characters transported to our time, surviving terrible circumstances and finally thriving.” –Anne Kreamer, author of Going Gray

“A memoir of great generosity–to herself, to her mother, to all mothers, to her friends and fans, to everyone who reads it. You don’t have to know Orenda or her music in order to recognize a version of your own life inside of her own. Plus all the juicy music-scene gossip. I couldn’t put it down.” –Alexander Payne

“Every paragraph of The Witch’s Daughter shimmers with a hauntingly precise perspective, and the spirit of the book is a delight, a wonder, even as it addresses turmoil, sadness, heartbreak. This is a riveting book about defiance. As Orenda seeks explanation for her mother’s twisted magic and vindictive spells, she finds wisdom and serenity and music. The minute I finished the book, I wanted to start right over at the beginning.” –Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief, The Titanic Survivors Book Club

“Orenda Fink’s band Azure Ray may have been deemed ‘whispercore, ’ but The Witch’s Daughter builds to a howling, feral scream. Tracing her hand-to-mouth itinerant childhood through years of enduring a narcissistic abuser, Fink renders the surreal horror of life with her mother so potently, the reader yearns for each escape: She enters a collapsing world of major labels, becomes an indie star, and finds solitude in the desert. Her odyssey is intertwined with famous cameos, mounting tragedy, unraveling familial lies, and urgent questions: Is the difference between the spiritual and the scientific primarily semantic? And how can we unweave our abusers’ threads from the fabric of ourselves?” –Chris Harding Thornton, author of Pickard County Atlas

“Orenda Fink’s book is an important document about the process of healing and individuating (becoming whole to ourselves) by stepping out of the abusive family system … You don’t have to have a borderline mother who believes herself to be a witch or an unprotective tragic father or find yourself in the salvation of creating music to relate to this book. Orenda takes you through the process of the enmeshed insanity and helps you name the unnamable. She also outlines the heartbreaking magic that comes with going no contact as the final last resort that many childhood trauma survivors pay dearly to arrive at. It’s the story of becoming lovable in a family that refuses to tell us we are. The book will change you.” –Patrick Teahan“What makes this memoir different are the questions around her mother’s power… and how Fink unravels the magic from the madness of her family life…. [She] balances the darkness with the light of recovery…providing insights both to her and perhaps as an inspiration to us also, to review our intergenerational patterns with both discernment and compassion.” –Southern Review of Books“Riveting…Equal parts cutting and compassionate, this tale of hard-won peace will resonate with readers wrestling with their own complicated families.” –Publishers Weekly“A story of power, family, and struggle, [The Witch’s Daughter] is a captivating look at growing up in the shadow of a dominant, unstable parent…. With rich imagery, thoughtful reflections, and compelling prose, Fink’s memoir will resonate with readers of Tara Westover’s Educated.” –Booklist”[A]n emotional memoir of [Fink’s] long struggle to wrest herself from her manipulative, destructive mother….A memorable book of raw, unvarnished recollections.” –Kirkus“Orenda Fink’s memoir is un-put-downable–it is a lyrical, compassionate, and complicated telling of the impacts of mental health and antagonism on multiple generations of a family. She brings a realistic and compelling lens to the confusing terrain of guilt, duty, grief, attachment, shame, and love that family members must navigate in these circumstances. It will validate the experience of so many survivors of these family systems.” –Dr. Ramani Durvasula, New York Times Bestselling Author of It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, clinical psychologist, and professor emerita of psychology, California State University, Los Angeles“When you finish this book, you will turn around and give it to someone who needs it. This is a master text on surviving trauma as a child and an adult. I couldn’t put it down.” –Phoebe Bridgers “Orenda Fink’s captivating memoir cascades with life and loss. Part detailed description of a gnarled family tree, part rock n’ roll tell-all, part exorcism of the many demons that her and us can recognize in ourselves but do not understand. I have been a longtime admirer of her art and have been fortunate enough to call her a friend for many years. Still I had not known much of what is contained in this book. We have all touched some kind of madness. We have all cast our own sorry, desperate type of spells. This book is a testament to those things which make us scared and brave and magically human all at once.” –Conor Oberst