Fleeing Family: A Reading List on Estrangement
July 03, 2025 at 03:30PM
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During the three years I planned on fleeing my abusive family and in the year after cutting all contact, I never knew the word “estrangement.” When I encountered the term in a college literature class in 2014, I Googled it, curious and desperate to understand myself. Yet, I couldn’t find any relevant articles with the advice I actually needed: how to navigate holidays alone. I disappeared instead through writing, reading, and, later, living abroad; I established a chosen family and developed a repertoire of coping skills.
A decade later, while researching for an essay, I was shocked to see an increase in estrangement narratives. Instead of finding community, though, reading these only made me feel further isolated. Most articles and books prioritized reconciliation and bemoaned bereaved parents: Why would someone dare abandon their family? Estrangement experts like the psychologist Joshua Coleman dismissed the idea of emotional abuse as mere generational differences and spoke disparagingly about estranged adult children (EAC). Some media portrayals even blamed social media for convincing people they had been emotionally abused. In reality, the National Domestic Violence Hotline acknowledges that emotional abuse is abuse. Karl Pillemer, a sociologist at Cornell University, estimates that 25-27% of Americans are cut off from at least one family member. If every story had two sides, why had the bereaved parents’ side been polished while the second face of the estrangement coin remained blank?
I found my answer outside of writing. Last September, I learned about and joined Together Estranged (TE). According to this nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering EAC and destigmatizing estrangement, there are four types: cordial contact, low contact, no contact, and complete estrangement. Groups like TE, Calling Home, Nate Postlethwait’s Online Community, and Stand Alone offer an essential aspect for healing: community.
The TE community gave me a vocabulary for my experience, offered resources for my healing journey, and identified writers who wrote ethically about the topic. To me, writing ethically means acknowledging abuse. In a society that prioritizes both good and bad parents, I could finally read stories that resonated with my own survival instead of blaming me for ripping apart my already broken family. I began collecting relatable narratives from the perspectives of EAC, as if I were collecting coins from the street. Each shiny penny I stumbled on, I cherished.
Thankfully, our stories had begun to emerge. Eamon Dolan wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about breaking up with his mother, Lea Page identified insight after leaving in an article with HuffPost, Jenisha Watts explored going low contact with her mother in a viral personal essay for The Atlantic, and Dawn Clancy detailed her choice of estrangement despite societal judgement in Good Housekeeping. With each piece, I finally imagined the second side of the coin taking shape with our stories in a truly balanced way.
My endless search to find non-stigmatizing stories from the EAC perspective inspired me to compile this reading list. Leaving was not a decision I made suddenly; estrangement originated with abandonment and abuse during my childhood, behavior I refused to accept in adulthood. These longform articles offered the solidarity I had yearned for my entire life.
I Had to Leave My Mother So I Could Survive (Elisabet Velasquez, Longreads, October 2019)
While there has been a dearth of research analyzing the correlation of abuse to estrangement, all EAC I personally know cite abuse as their primary reason for leaving.
As Elisabet Velasquez notes so eloquently in her title, estrangement was key to survival. In her essay, she relates how she broke the cycle of abuse. For me, the first step in breaking that cycle was when I was 15, acknowledging that my parents—individuals I depended upon for love— failed to protect me. Instead of holding a parent accountable as someone who ought to provide shelter, food, basic needs, and love, a minor might blame themself. This cognitive dissonance ensures mental survival. Velasquez says, “As a child, my mother’s behavior was a cruelty I learned to love. As an adult, I want to make excuses for her abuse and emotional abandonment. In my writing, I search for reasons to forgive. . . ”
Growing up, my mother would often say the devil was using me. This was her way of explaining any behavior that was not agreeable to her. This was her way of justifying any reaction of hers that was abusive in nature. One Sunday, just as we were getting ready for church, my mother was ironing our church clothes. While I waited, I began clowning around with my older sister. I don’t recall what in my laugh triggered the burning or what happened moments before she pressed the iron into my arm. I do recall the moments after, the smell of melting flesh, the flap of skin hanging off my arm, the moment I first met my blood.
This moment paralyzed me in such a way that I did not cry. My unemotional response to being burned with an iron made me question if I was indeed demonic. If I was used to this kind of hell. She wiped my skin off of the iron and back onto the dress as I watched the dress steam under the weight of my trauma.
Why I Haven’t Talked to My Father in 17 Years (Jessica Berger Gross, The Cut, June 2017)
Jessica Berger Gross had an abusive father, an enabler mother, and siblings who minimized her experiences. After a childhood of secrecy and violence, leaving was the key for Gross to “be happy.” In this piece for Father’s Day, Gross says she’s had no contact with her father, hasn’t sent Father’s Day cards, nor spoken to her relatives for 17 years. Instead, she celebrated the holiday with her husband and son at home. Cutting ties allowed Gross to “create a loving family of my own to replace the one I was born into.”
Unexpectedly, I started to feel better. Not having to constantly battle my parents meant that I was free to take a long look inward. Yes, my mother and father had done the laundry and signed the permission slips and praised my report card and given me a middle-class childhood. They’d sacrificed to send me to college. But along the way they’d managed to stain the first half of my life; to wound me. I resolved to not let them ruin the second half.
For all [estranged] people—and certainly for me—a common thread is dealing with the shame. The idea of honoring your mother and father runs deep in our culture. Although Americans are individualists, we’re still expected to go home for the holidays and to cite our parents as our greatest sources of inspiration. Sibling relationships can be more fraught, but there too we’re expected to offer unconditional love and loyalty, or at least stick it out. Rejecting your family seems to violate the natural order of things. People who don’t speak to their parents are considered troubled and vengeful—maybe even evil.
That should change. Parents don’t always live up to their job descriptions. When they don’t—when they cross that thin line separating the normal failings of human beings from more egregious, unforgivable mistakes—then adult children who make the difficult decision to cut off ties should be able to do so without stigma. We celebrate when a victim of domestic violence manages to break free from an abusive spouse. Why is it any different with parents?”
For some, going no contact might be the safest option that brings relief and freedom. For me, being able to flee my ex-family and legally change my name in a confidential court hearing meant that I was finally safe. In the years since, I celebrated the August anniversary of running away as my “freedom day.” A friend once marked the 10-year celebration by gifting me a framed, original photograph and wishing me “happy birthday.” His logic? While it wasn’t the day I was born, it was the day I was born into myself.
On the 26-Year Search for a Photo of My Father (Anna Qu, Literary Hub, August 2021)
When asked about family, I often swallowed my truth or simply changed the subject. In 2023, Sixth Tone reported on “broken kinship” within China. The topic of cutting ties remained overwhelmingly taboo, and was largely avoided. Tactics included lying to save face, using short replies to satisfy curiosity, and changing the topic quickly. Anna Qu, cut off from her mother, visited China in search of information about her father, who had died within a year of her birth. Qu demonstrates how calculated brevity and artful deflections could avoid the topic with tact.
“Yes, yes, she’s very good. They are all great,” I add loudly, referring to my stepfather, half-brother, and half-sister. I was taught that there are things you just don’t tell strangers, even those related by blood. While there were many women in my mother’s situation—women whose husbands died—few were like my mother. I was one of the lucky ones.
My childhood had not been a happy one with my stepfamily, but looking around me, I see the choices my mother made more clearly. Compared to the life I would have had here, my first-world problems are petty complaints, mere inconveniences. How could I complain now about how I wasn’t treated like her other children? That I wasn’t given the same privileges?
Afraid they’d ask for more details, I change the subject. I ask the question that’s been brewing for as long as I can remember: “I wanted to ask, do you have any photos of my father?”
A Visit to Madam Bedi (Tara Westover, The New Yorker, February 2025)
The grief of estrangement (and for some, the hope of reconciliation) persists despite the best of intentions. In Tara Westover’s case, a friend invited her to stay with his mother, Madam Bedi, in India for as long as she liked, despite the fact that he wouldn’t be present.
Westover eventually accepted her friend’s invitation to a wealthy home of royal heritage, where she was awed by Madam Bedi. She was chauffeured to wherever she desired, was served oatmeal when she couldn’t handle masalas, and began to write a gratitude journal. She tried to frame her feelings about her estranged father as indebtedness, but rage boiled. Day after day, she attempted to rewrite traumatic memories into moments of gratitude, a cognitive dissonance abused children use as a coping skill. As a child, I could not transform my parents’ volatile relationship into a loving one, no matter how hard I tried. Leaving and estranging myself from family and my Southern cultures became necessary to heal.
The invitation confused me. I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother. I pawed at the idea, then dismissed it. I did not want to go east; I wanted to go west. I was waiting for my family to reclaim me.
I don’t know where the hope lived or what it lived on. I had been estranged from my father for a year by then, but I was still telling myself that the estrangement was temporary, that the breach would heal. My mother was key. I thought she would convince my father, soften his heart. That’s how it happens in the Bible, when two souls fall out of kinship. God softens a heart. I wasn’t religious, not the way my father had raised me to be, but I believed in the softening of hearts. So I waited. For a letter. A phone call. I imagined my father saying, “Come home.” Of course I could not go to India. When my father called, I had to be ready.
Then another year had passed with silence from my father. It was difficult, then, to keep believing that we would reconcile, but equally difficult to give up that belief. I did not know how to live with the loss of my parents, or the bitterness that the loss was introducing into my life.
On the Futility of Defying Extinction (Christina Yoseph, The Rumpus, June 2019)
While breaking up with family might restrict access to your hometown or learning your mother tongue from a parent, it can also offer new opportunities. For Christina Yoseph, this came in learning Assyrian, her native language, by repeating words from memory or dictionary pages because she had no one to speak with. Both Westover and Yoseph’s essays conclude in an uncertain state: Should Westover believe the advice of Madame Bedi? Should Yoseph join a queer language learning community? These essays don’t follow the typical hero’s journey; instead, they reveal the complexity and liminality of estrangement.
Just after I cut off contact with my dad, I read an article in the New York Times about a man named Amadeo GarcÃa GarcÃa. GarcÃa, who lives in Perú, is the last living native speaker of his language, Taushiro. Although GarcÃa has several children, none of them know his native tongue, so he communicates with them in Spanish.
I thought of my relationship with my own family, with my own father. With our language, or, I guess, their language. I considered my legitimacy as an Assyrian. I know my experience with loss of language, culture, and community comes nowhere near GarcÃa’s in terms of its imminence, its permanence.
It is not important, at least not to this essay, why my father and I stopped speaking. What is important is that we did stop speaking, and now I am adrift, in some ways. I understand that I’m the one who made the choice, even if I don’t like the way it turned out, completely.”
Revenge Travel Helped Me Learn to Manage My Anxiety (Monique Laban, Catapult, November 2022)
Estranged individuals have written about the mental health impact of their abusive parents: Stephanie Foo investigated Complex-PTSD in her bestselling memoir What My Bones Know, Emi Nietfeld explored addiction in her memoir Acceptance, and Eamon Dolan covers many mental health connections to childhood abuse in The Power of Parting.
As the topic of estrangement appears more often in literary magazines and other media, I hope there will be less onus on us to explain why we’re estranged. Instead, we can creatively explore how estrangement affects us. In an excerpt of my memoir, I explored how massage and travel were healing for me, with estrangement only as the backdrop. I am excited to write and read stories about what opportunities estrangement has opened up for us, such as healing travel narratives. This reclamation is an act of agency.
In healthy familial relationships, teenagers earn agency bit by bit. For me, estrangement was my ticket to freedom. As Monique Laban explored “improper” (ahem, fun) normal experiences, it increased her anxiety. The memory of her parents’ voices critiqued every new action, catastrophizing her behavior.
I had been estranged from my family since the start of the pandemic, but I admitted I could still hear my parents in my head, screaming at me in airports and hotel rooms. This was not only my first international trip with my partner; this was also my first international trip without them.
Up to that point, estrangement had been the happiest change I had made in my life. A while back, I sent my parents and siblings letters that stated I would no longer be in contact with them (an in-depth explanation would take several other essays). Then I bought my first pullover hoodie and my first box of Pillsbury Toaster Strudel; both were previously forbidden by my parents because they weren’t for “proper” people. I started showing off my tattoos more often; I’d realized I was inadvertently hiding them, as if scared that my family would jump out from behind a corner, ready to judge and moralize about my appearance. I signed up for introductory classes in critical theory and trauma studies, subjects they would have scolded me for taking due to their lack of “practicality.”
It haunted me that my parents would have been quick to control, insult, and throw tantrums at all my major life events, as they had done for school dances and graduations. While estranged, I could live the rest of my life and its milestones away from a family who wanted to keep me from experiencing them.
We’re Done: For Me, with the Parents I Had, “No Contact” was the Only Option. (Emi Nietfeld, Slate, August 2024)
Last fall, during the first semester of my MFA program, I journaled obsessively about estrangement. A professor insisted that my memoir was too heavy, too dark; in class, he shared a writing prompt to inspire levity, just after the election, for us to reflect on utopias. One student scoffed at the prompt, but I—who had already been dubbed “the trauma writer”—surprised myself by acquiescing to imagine what a utopia might look like. “The future where I would be safe,” my response ended, “is a future where more estranged people would be safe.”
Since that prompt, I have leaned more into writing about the safety, opportunity, and joy of estrangement. I believe safety will be guaranteed when victim-survivors of abuse are believed, divorcing relatives is destigmatized, and research identifies a correlation between childhood abuse and estrangement. Safety comes not only from normalizing estrangement, but in acknowledging the joy of estrangement—something that I’d never read before Emi Nietfeld’s reported essay.
But after four years of no contact with my mom and almost two decades without my other parent, I want to shout: Estrangement can also feel wonderful! Saying goodbye changed my life for the better, and I’m far from alone. Understanding the experiences of millions of Americans like me is crucial to understanding why estrangement seems to be on the rise—and why that might be a good thing.
I feel hope and gratitude for essays and books about estrangement from Catapult and Restless Books, including How to be Unmothered by Camille U. Adams, and the anthology, No Contact: Writers on Estrangement edited by Jenny Bartoy. More stories are bound to emerge. I want articles and personal essays told by an EAC for every single holiday. I want to see an increase in estrangement narratives where we have the agency to determine what is best for us instead of being guilted into familial reconciliation. Why settle for one side of a coin when our stories could fill a bank?
Anesce Dremen is a US writer and educator often found with a tea cup, traveling between the US, China, and India. She has been supported by Fulbright, the Critical Language Scholarship, and Gilman Scholarship. Her work has been published in Stillhouse Press, Gordon Square Review, Persephone’s Daughters, Tea Journey, and ProFellow.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/03/estrangement-reading-list/
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