Acclaimed indie musician and songwriter Orenda Fink delivers a lyrical and moving memoir of a tumultuous childhood with a mother who battled mental illness and addiction.

From her perch on a kitchen stool each night, Orenda Fink’s darkly charismatic mother spins family lore and tells tales of the supernatural powers she wields, insisting that both she and Orenda are magic. By day, Orenda’s childhood is marked by instability and uncertainty. Her family moves from town to town, chasing a fresh start whenever the money runs out. Orenda’s mother insists that she is a witch, and magic is their means of protection from the world outside of their family. Orenda encounters her mother’s magic in all its forms: a crisp $20 bill materializes from nothing when money has run out and a bottle of congealed blood lurks in the closet for unspoken reasons.

When her mother’s substance abuse and controlling behavior crescendo, Orenda escapes to pursue a music career in Birmingham, Alabama, and then storied Athens, Georgia, forming bands Little Red Rocket and Azure Ray. She orbits the family home, always drawn back by her mother’s dark powers and her own need to solve the mystery of whether that claim of magic—or any magic—is real, or merely an expression of mental illness. Orenda’s journey takes her from churches in the American South—eager to exercise the demons out of her—to even more mysterious practitioners of country magic in the Southeast and beyond.