A journal that spans the years of a little girl's childhood, who is becoming a woman amid her recovery from a violent and traumatic life. The bitter woman is on a journey in which she searches her past to recall vague memories of insufferable childhood. She longs to remember the little girl of quiet strength and to forget the bitter choices she had to make to save her family. She longed for a life she could imagine beyond the trauma of her adolescence. Her childhood experiences begin to inform the woman she is becoming and leave her questioning her own identity. The protagonist finds the passions of her heart are constrained by a harsh world that illicitly expresses the desire for her story to be silenced. As she records her truth, she wonders how her humanity could be acceptably expressed, and how she is allowed to contribute her voice. This stages the depth of her adult experiences, and how those feelings affected all of her relationships. A young woman growing up with complex desires of motherhood or adventure, of a former love and the loss of it, and the great weight of responsibility as she learns to accept herself and a life of recovery. The bittersweet parts of her story became a child's premature crisis; a life-altering event, an instinctual aspect of the main character's identity, and, ultimately, the fight for her and her siblings' survival. The resolve of the Bittersweet Woman is her raw truth: exploring childhood imagination and recovery, of digging deeper than you thought possible until you find the strength to survive when you're broken, and, at long last, the making and manifestation of your own path, even when you've been dealt a bittersweet life.
