Praise for The Part That Burns

Simply beautiful … precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid. —Joyce Carol Oates

This story builds so beautifully … this voice is so confident. I love this book and am grateful it is in the world.
-Dorothy Allison, New York Times bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller

The presentation of the author’s life story as a series of fragments … poignantly reflects a self-described “brokenness”: “you can tear a thing apart and tape it back together, and it will still be torn and whole.” A textured remembrance of a traumatic childhood that … offers affecting moments of beauty. -Kirkus, starred review

Expectations can be slippery. This quote from the opening segment of The Part That Burns sets the stage for events that live up to that title as Jeannine Ouellette cultivates a story that moves from family adversity and growing up to bigger-picture lessons about life. The Part That Burns is a lovely memoir of what it means to recall childhood's impressions, lasting lessons, and ultimate impact, for better and for worse.
-Midwest Review of Books

"The part that burns also glows." Not since Bastard Out of Carolina have I felt so seen and moved and wowed. I'm sad and angry that Ouellette and I share a history of childhood sexual abuse, and more. I'm heartened and amazed by her resilience and brilliance, and the defiant, graceful beauty she's wrought from the brutal. Through its notable brevity, structure, prose, subtlety, nuance, layers, wisdom, and compassion, The Part That Burns is a master class in memoir, and living. I loved it.—Ethel Rohan, author of In the Event of Contact

Vital, full of energy and wisdom, Jeannine Ouellette's memoir crackles with excitement. From the shores of Lake Superior to the mountains of Wyoming to the banks of the Mississippi River, this is a story of American migration—not just of families but of spirits. I loved the brave little girl at the heart of this story, and so will you. —Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl

Some books resonate in a way that's difficult to put into words—this is one of those books. The language and imagery are stunning, as is the structure; cracked open and put back together again into a beautiful, fractured whole. —Heather Frese, author of The Baddest Girl on the Planet

.Ouellette’s story is one of truth and beauty, full of lyrical language and images, and filled with moments of awe and wonder between Ouellette and her children. — Jody Keisner, author of Under My Bed and Other Essays, a memoir (forthcoming 2022)

I love this book so intensely. It blew me away and turned into one of my top three reads of the year. There is so much sparse beauty and so much authentic pain in this fractured story of a fractured family. I don’t want to give spoilers but the relationship between the narrator and a mother-figure who is not her mother particularly hit me hard emotionally and is a relationship I will think about periodically for the rest of my life. This book BURNS, but don’t let that fool you. This is not a “depressing” read, somehow. The language is charged with vitality and the story and characters and voice are so viscerally alive and true that it left me kind of shooting sparks. If you love dogs, too, you are in for some extra connection to this book. —Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down

With a poet's voice and an uncanny knack for mining memory, Ouellette's memoir-in-fragments evokes pain and beauty in equal measure. Ouellette understands the elliptical nature of memory, the way years and experience can transform our understanding of the things we did as children and the things that were done to us. She loops back and forth in time to the same seminal experiences, adding layers of depth and understanding, and in so doing shows us how her wild determination to overcome the trauma of her childhood results in a life lived on her own terms. Full of love, loss, and hard-won redemption, The Part That Burns is a fiercely beautiful memoir. -Alison McGhee, New York Times bestselling author of The Opposite of Fate and Someday

Here is a writer with an extraordinary gift for prose that's complex, imagistic, and startling. -Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows

At turns tender and devastating, these essays are finely carved vignettes that, laid together, form a powerful portrait of one woman's path from hard girlhood to motherhood, the grace and mettle it takes not only to survive but to flourish. -Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me and Girlhood

Jeannine Ouellette’s memoir glows with incandescent storytelling centered around memories, motherhood, and resilience. The Part That Burns proves that life isn’t lived in a linear way. Girlhood and womanhood can exist simultaneously, our former selves meeting our present selves. Ouellette’s writing is ablaze with a burnished beauty.
-Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About

Powerful and urgent, this is truly a book for our time: It teases beauty out of ugliness; it shows the courage of everyday survival; it creates wholeness out of fragments. With her gorgeous and precise prose, Ouellette shows that when faced with abuse we can do more than merely endure – we can fight back, we can flourish, we can thrive.
-Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

Jeannine Ouellette has gifted an entrancing and courageous story to those who have ever felt forced to silence memories of childhood sexual abuse. She is a child, searching wild, unending landscapes for doorways to other dimensions of understanding and safety. She is a young wife, then a young mother, hypnotically looping back again and again to make sense of the memories that won’t let her go. Like lacy tumbleweeds finally uprooted and taking to air, this too is a story of flight. Her flight on black-as-space country roads; her flight to reach a faraway mother figure who once said she cared; and the flight of her deepest-down words, finally taking to air for those who must hear them. This is a story about giving voice to all the pieces of one’s life, rendered with devastating beauty, heart, and artistry. -Diane Zinna, author of The All-Night Sun

In The Part That Burns, Jeannine Ouellette writes: “Here is the thing about doorways: once you step through them you can never go back. Even if you do, you will never see the world the same way as before.” And so it is in this beautifully told, fractured memoir. Ouellette creates a house of many doorways into her broken past for the reader to step through. Each door opens into rooms painted in lush, evocative description. Our perspective shifts, our understanding deepens with each telling and, in the end, Ouellette’s story changes the way we see the world.
-Heidi Seaborn, author of Give a Girl Chaos and executive editor of The Adroit Journal