Interviews don’t always flow neatly. Sometimes there are long silences, sudden changes of subject, and words that trail into the air like smoke. That’s how it was talking with Wendy. Her story is not linear, not polished. It comes in fragments, broken sentences, and pauses that say as much as the words.
What follows is not a tidy narrative, but the shape of her story as it came out.
Q: Can we start at the beginning?
Wendy: (long pause)
I was in a kids’ home first. Then foster care. Didn’t even know it wasn’t my real family until—what—eight, nine years old? The other kids knew. They teased me. Called me… (trails off).
Q: And school?
Wendy: Loved reading. Couldn’t stop. Got in trouble for it, actually. Teachers would catch me under the desk, book open. (laughs) But I wasn’t angelic, don’t think that. Once I discovered boys… yeah, that was the end. I left, cut ties with my foster mum.
Q: Drugs?
Wendy: Oh, I felt fantastic. Like I belonged. Like finally I was grown up. Didn’t expect to live past thirty, to be honest.
Q: Prison.
Wendy: In and out. But books were still with me. Always. Did my degree inside. A Master’s, too. Not because of prison. (sharp laugh) In spite of it. They put up barriers. They made it harder. But I wasn’t gonna stop.
Q: You said once—
Wendy: About the violence?
Q: Yes.
Wendy: It’s never easy to leave. People say, just go. But you’ve got kids, bills. And people look at you—like, why don’t you? You wait for the next explosion. Always waiting. And you try to be perfect, but he’s always looking for something to break. (silence)
Q: Do you remember the good times?
Wendy: (long silence)
Yes. That’s the hardest part. There were good times. And then there weren’t.
Q: And your biological mother?
Wendy: Oh, that— (smiles) We were the same. Fourteen years she lived on the street, and still, when I met her: same looks, same quirks, even the same love of reading. I couldn’t believe it. Like seeing myself in a mirror I didn’t know existed.
Wendy’s story doesn’t resolve into something neat. But maybe that’s the point. The fragments matter because they show both the fractures and the resilience.
Her pauses and silences tell as much as her words. And together, they tell us that survival is rarely straightforward, and healing is often found in the fragments.
The Afterword 
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