You cannot love someone you fear - at least not at the same time. As a child, though, it seemed normal to Violet to ricochet between the two, depending on whether he was drunk or not, or just simmering with resentment over an imagined slight. But as she grows, so does her own resentment, although she knows better than to let it show. On the upside, the constant dread of his next night of rage intensifies her glee each time he makes a fool of himself. For a while that's enough, but as time goes on, he spirals further out of control, until the night she's always known was coming. Something has...

Fourteen-year-old Jake is used to being on his own. He hasn't heard from his father since he was seven, and he doesn't really remember him. His mother has two jobs and night classes, so he is usually alone at home. The independence is nice, but he gets scared in the empty apartment, especially at night. Jake often goes alone to see his eleven-year-old sister, Sarah, who has early-onset schizophrenia and lives in a residence for severely disturbed children. He knows that his mother doesn't have much time, but it bothers him as she comes with him less often. He still holds out hope that a drug...

In "Slices," Violet Wilson looks back at her first years away from home, first at college, then after dropping out, as she struggles to make sense of her urges to cut herself. She doesn't offer neatly wrapped-up explanations of her motivations; the vignettes focus on what she thought and how she felt in the moment. The few dispassionate memories of childhood abuse are not served up as "A-ha " explanations, since that's not how it felt at the time. There is a lot of confusion, a lot of shame, and a lot of failed attempts to connect. But there are also some patient friends, a couple of morbidly...

In this follow-up to "Slices," Violet Wilson tries to juggle taking classes at a new university with working with a new shrink to stop cutting herself. The first small step - understanding not why she feels what she feels, but just what she feels at all - is more confusing than her college courses. Simply being aware of being inside her own body can be far more painful and terrifying than a nice clean cut on her arm. These new sections are a long way from resolution, but this was where the long slog toward sanity finally started.

Violet Wilson didn't set out to write a trilogy; in her defense, they weren't even trendy when she started this memoir. This final volume includes an almost-normal romantic relationship, an aborted confrontation with her mother and brother, and the major depressive episode that led to - in a typically perverse twist - the end of cutting and the beginning of something like sanity. This isn't the end of Violet's story, but 12 years later, it might be safe to say that it's the end of the slices.