Jenna Avery has been drawn to the idea of true love like a basic bitch is to pumpkin spice. At least basic bitches leave feeling satisfied. Jenna, however, has run the gamut when it comes to relationships. At the age of 30, she closed out her twenties with three ex-husbands, a suitcase filled with daddy issues and a margarita at the ready. Despite the trauma of narcissists and psychopaths, she found a way to rise above it all and create a successful business, travel the world and eventually, finding answers to questions she didn’t even know she had.

My Ashes explores the idea that while we’re all culpable for our actions, that maybe we’re motivated in ways we never considered. Compiled of letters to the men that have influenced her, either positively or negatively, Jenna explores the trauma that most women encounter multiple times in their life, while also doing some soul searching. Closure was the name of the game, humor a mere side effect.

Triggers. They’re the worst. The memories of what you’ve done are sometimes easily avoided, like pushing away a plate of food that disgusts me. The triggers, however, are what sneak up like the boogeyman. More than twenty years later, I still have trouble processing everything, despite over a dozen therapists, years of drugs, and thousands of hours spent ‘fixing.’

My Ashes is not only a memoir of hookups and divorces, it’s the journey of an average woman deciding that she wasn’t going to continue allowing her daddy issues affect the path she took in life. Whether it’s writing a heartfelt letter to her brother to writing about how it felt to find photos of herself having sex on the internet at the age of seventeen, Jenna finds ways to show that we’re all connected through our experiences.