Coming Undone

A Memoir

By: Terri White

Narrated by: Terri White

Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

A powerful, raw and unflinchingly honest account of a life coming undone.

To everyone else, Terri White appeared to be living the dream, named one of Folio's Top Women in US Media and accruing further awards for the magazines she was editing. In reality, she was rapidly skidding towards a mental health crisis that would land her in a locked psychiatric ward as her past caught up with her.

As well as growing up in a household in poverty, Terri endured sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a number of her mother's partners. Her success defied all expectations, but the greater the disparity between her outer achievements and inner demons, the more she struggled to hold everything together.

Coming Undone is the story of Terri's unravelling and her precarious navigation back from a life in pieces.

©2020 Terri White (P)2020 Canongate Books Ltd

Courageous story-telling by the person who wrote it

I admire Terri White as Editor-in-Chief of Empire Magazine and Pilot TV Magazine. And knew she was incredibly bright with a gifted ability to articulate her thoughts and feelings and do so with wit and frankness. But this memoir is heartbreaking and I was afraid to listen to it but knew I couldn’t read it - knowing that Terri had voiced the audiobook made it imperative that I hear her read these words about this time in her life. And what she has lived through - I was scared to even begin it because I didn’t know if I could get through it. I knew it was going to be raw but she tells the story in a way that keeps you close to it, unflinchingly keeps you near her as if you are there but helps through the writing to keep you going, to keep you with the story - I knew I had to hear it all, and so through some charm and incredibly nimble language that helps you through the hardest parts to hear and imagine, I got through it. It is uplifting, devastating, so relatable to so many of us who, while not anywhere near the experiences, have felt bereft at where life has taken us at times and that we in the end control and have the freedom to choose where we go. And we can get there. Just courageous - thank you Terri!

3 Stars All Around

I didn't finish listening to Coming Undone because it was just too depressing.

The book does warn about explicit depictions of horrible abusive incidents.

Since I was in the mood for something less shocking, I stopped listening.

If you have suffered abuse, it might help you by hearing about another person's trials at the hand of an "caretaker."

I'm assuming Terri White is a resilient and talented person, since she got her memoir written. I just couldn't absorb all the graphic details right now. Maybe dealing with the pandemic made me less able to process the bad stuff she went through.

So the book is not badly written. It's not about a subject that should be ignored.

It was just too grim for me.

Strange, odd and no real conclusion

Good narration and poetic telling of the authors lived experience. As a listener I was left wondering about too many things. The ending was odd and abrupt.