Ordinary Trauma

An outstanding memoir: keenly intelligent, elegantly shaped, beautifully described, and rich with honest insight. At times Sinor’s voice is as intimate as a whisper, and the prose is always crisp, clear, pulling the reader forward into the deeper ends of her story.

Dinty W. Moore, author of the memoir Between Panic and Desire

In evocative and highly charged prose, Sinor makes us feel the importance of women’s stories from the home front, of scars received fighting domestic wars. Through her brilliant use of metaphor, she shows us how and why these hidden wars are emotionally, and sometimes literally, deadly. This is an extraordinary, harrowing, and stunning book.

Sue William Silverman, author of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew

A sharp, relevant coming-of-age memoir. Sinor’s writing is strong—exploratory, self-implicating, and often simply beautiful.

Debra Gwartney, author of the memoir Live Through This

In Ordinary Trauma, Jennifer Sinor explains the universal themes of loss, grief, and finding self-worth in a way that is utterly captivating and unique. Told exclusively through interwoven vignettes, the memoir reminds the reader of the importance of women’s stories, of the traumas that society deems ordinary, of the way women are taught to hide and to wait for the ocean to sweep it all away. Ordinary Trauma proves that no trauma is ordinary...

Mid-America Review

Ordinary Trauma is a layered, complex, elegantly written memoir of individual and collective trauma. …Intense, thoughtful, and thought provoking.

Western American Literature