Nakia M. Liles Memoir Frames Healing as Accepting Past Selves

Author Nakia M. Liles has released Pieces of Me, a memoir about trauma, spiritual searching, motherhood and reinvention that argues healing comes from accepting, rather than abandoning, the versions of oneself shaped by survival. Organized around six stages of her life, the book pairs each chapter with a letter to the self Liles was then, while addressing abuse, chronic illness, being shot and suicidal despair without framing suffering as a tidy path to redemption. Liles says she wrote the memoir to affirm that people need not become perfectly healed or strong before they can belong to their own lives.