The inspiration behind "Sleep Like Starfish" comes from Rachelle Atkins's own history of battling illness after illness.
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
I found myself battling illness after illness and living with chronic pain. One night while at a monthly meeting of local creatives, I shared an essay about my earliest memory from what would later become this memoir, and had an epiphany of sorts. After the reading, the pain I lived with in my body immediately cranked up to a 10 and I began to wonder if it was possible that a lifetime of unprocessed trauma could be the root issue of my health problems which eventually culminated in a breast cancer diagnosis.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
After my parents break-up, they left me behind to live in my childhood home with my first-grade teacher to finish out the school year. While I have no memory of this experience or the year that followed, it created in me an abandonment wound that would shape my relationships and the way I saw myself and my place in the world. Later, the familial chaos that followed in my adolescent years, doubled down on my sense of unbelonging, both in my family and the world at large. Eventually, I found myself on my own as a teenager in a small beach town on the East coast.
What I discovered through my research, and the process of writing this book, turns victim consciousness on its head, ultimately healing the family I came from as well as the one I created. My parents, both neglected and abandoned children themselves, had been battling demons, too. This book is for everyone because no escapes trauma.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
