Voices Within: Family Chronicles - Paperback

by Lana Stasek (Author), Vladyslava Borodavka (Editor), Vladyslava Borodavka (Editor)

From award-winning author Lana Stasek comes a memoir about family history, inherited trauma, and the stories that continue shaping us long after they are buried.

Some stories begin before you arrive. This one begins with a death that no one was allowed to name.

Lana Stasek was born five years later, into the space her unborn brother left behind. He was erased before she arrived, but his presence remained in the weight she carried without explanation and in the sense that she was somehow living for two.

She grew up in Lisichansk, Eastern Ukraine, in a family where trauma didn't have a name - it had a belt, a slammed door, and a grandfather who hid cash in pots while his wife slowly lost her mind. She eventually made her way to America with no English and no safety net, carrying all that inherited silence in luggage she never agreed to pack.

This is a portrait of everyone who left a mark: the grandfather who was cruel and kind with the same hands, the husband who existed mostly on paper, and the boy nobody protected who was found again thirty-five years later. Each chapter is its own world - a person, a scar, a truth that waited too long to be said.

Voices Within: Family Chronicles is not comfortable reading. It's the kind of honesty that makes you set down whatever you're doing, stop mid-page, and recognize someone from your own life.