Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways: A Memoir
A PEOPLE magazine pick, Best Books Fall 2023: "A breathtaking memoir about surviving a horrifying childhood; Means...transforms memories...into a work of art."
Starred review from Kirkus: "This book is an outstanding debut...A harrowing and soulful memoir to be read, savored, and reread."
"Brittany Means has pieced together the shards of a devastating childhood in this powerful memoir. It's gut-wrenching but at the same time triumphant, harrowing yet exquisitely told. Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways is a story of survival that left me choked up and cheering."
-Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle
"The book's lasting impact might be what it demands of the memoir genre. Brittany Means has, at once, created the most readable and the most psychologically rigorous book I've read in decades. I needed the reminder that art can do this."
-Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"I can't write a story about myself as the sad, quiet child of two drug addicts. That's not how it was, even when it was. To me, sleeping in the car was normal. Better, it was comfy and fun. I loved my bed made of clothes inside a trash bag that I sank into slowly like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family movie. . . . I loved the motels and their swimming pools and trashy daytime TV channels. . . . Nobody could tell us what to do."
Brittany Means's childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. Riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany didn't care where they were going--to a roadside midwestern motel, a shelter, or The Barn in Indiana, the cluttered mansion her Pentecostal grandparents called home--as long as they were together. But every so often, her mom would surprise her--and leave.
As Brittany grew older and questioned her own complicated relationships and the poverty, abuse, and instability that enveloped her, she began to recognize that hell wasn't only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the cycle of violence that entrapped her family. Through footholds such as horror movies, neuropsychology, and strong bonds, Brittany makes sense of this cycle and finds a way to leave it.
While untangling the web of her most painful memories, Brittany crafts a tale of self-preservation, resilience, and hope with a unique narrative style--a sparkling example of the human ability to withstand the most horrific experiences and still thrive.
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Brittany Means is a writer and editor living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A graduate of Iowa's MFA Nonfiction Writing Program, Means has received several awards for her work, including the Magdalena Award and the Grace Paley Fellowship. Her other talents include doing horror movie screams and baking ugly but delicious cakes.
"Brittany Means has pieced together the shards of a devastating childhood in this powerful memoir. It's gut-wrenching but at the same time triumphant, harrowing yet exquisitely told. Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways is a story of survival that left me choked up and cheering."
-Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle
"Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways will change the way readers understand what, and if anything, actually survives our childhoods. What is a parent? But the book's lasting impact might be what it demands of the memoir genre. Brittany Means has, at once, created the most readable and the most psychologically rigorous book I've read in decades. I needed the reminder that art can do this."
-Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"There are all kinds of memoirs, but some should be read by every person who ever thinks to write or read one. Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways makes that list. What Brittany Means accomplishes on the page, telling the truth of her own life, the brutality and beauty of it, with the prose of a recovering poet, is often attempted and rarely successful. This memoir is a success all the way down."
-Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody's Daughter
"Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways is a memoir that balances a real generosity for the self, a real generosity for the world the self existed and exists in, but it is still sharp, stark, honest, and operates with an enviable clarity. The writing expands lived emotions that people often flatten: sadness, fear, pleasure. Within that expansion, a reader is offered an entire universe."
-Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America
"So vivid is the writing, that at moments, I had to look up from this memoir and remind myself that I was not in the car with Brittany Means. . . . With heart-wrenching honesty, Means explores and reveals the violence that afflicts many children today. Her first-hand account is a testament to the resilience of children, but also a revealing telling that calls us to account as a country and people where too many children fall through the cracks in their profound suffering."
-David Ambroz, author of A Place Called Home
"Brilliantly paced, impeccably written, and truly moving, Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways is storytelling at its most powerful and most vulnerable; through each scene of brutality and betrayal, Brittany Means shows us the extraordinary lengths we often must go to find humanity, forgiveness, and trust."
-Susan Steinberg, author of Machine
"This book is an outstanding debut...A harrowing and soulful memoir to be read, savored, and reread."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)
