I’m currently writing a memoir about growing up in a “normal” home, free of addiction, abandonment, abuse, or other obvious childhood trauma. I did well in school; I had my share of friends. Yet I spent my young life feeling deeply and unshakably worthless, which led me to enter a risky relationship that spanned my entire adolescence.

The book is the story of how I—an ordinary girl in the 1960s—came to live a clandestine double life, and how, at age 21, it almost took me down. It also asks some bigger questions: What makes any of us stay in situations and relationships that we know are hurting us? And what does it take to finally walk away?