Coming Undone
A Memoir
Terri White
“Every morning when I wake up, I'm always surprised, sometimes crestfallen, to have been spat out again, tender and bruised and somehow a little less.”
Available as Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
A powerful, raw and unflinchingly honest account of a life coming undone
‘BREATHTAKING’ Dolly Alderton, ‘REMARKABLE’ Marian Keyes, ‘LIFE-CHANGING’ Emma Jane Unsworth, ‘COMPELLING’ Amy Liptrot, ‘EXTRAORDINARY’ Sali Hughes
To everyone else, Terri White appeared to be living the dream – living in New York City, with a top job editing a major magazine. In reality, she was struggling with the trauma of an abusive childhood and rapidly skidding towards a mental health crisis that would land her in a psychiatric ward.
Coming Undone is Terri’s story of her unravelling, and her precarious journey back from a life in pieces.
“A stunning memoir, hard reading in places, but it feels urgent and necessary … White writes like a blood-stained angel”
Cathy Rentzenbrink
the Times
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“A breathtaking read … her honesty and her eloquence is the thing that makes it such a privilege to read … a raw, shocking, beautiful book”
Dolly Alderton
the High Low
”Coming Undone by Terri White is possibly the most affecting, moving memoir I’ve ever read. Painful and exquisite, her writing about how childhood trauma shaped her got to me in a very visceral way. It’s a remarkable book”
Marian Keyes
“Raw and remarkable”
guardian, Book Of The Year
“Powerful and moving, beautifully written, packed with stunning set-pieces and, I thought, a stinging-but-dazzling, complicated love-hate letter to NYC, and to how our dreams can too often deceive us. I found it bittersweet and raw, and radical as a memoir narrative: not so much a redemption tale as a chronicle of the real fallout of trauma: messy, difficult, intricate, infinite … [A] life-changing read”
Emma Jane Unsworth
Terri White
Terri White is a writer, broadcaster and the Editor-in-Chief of Empire magazine, for which she was named Entertainment Magazine Editor of the Year (British Society of Magazine Editors). She previously edited some of the biggest publications in the UK and US, including Time Out New York and ShortList, and has also written for the Guardian, Grazia and the Big Issue.
@Terri_White
Tattoos Helped Me Reclaim My Body After Years Of Trauma
Terri White, author of Coming Undone on how the pain and visibility of her tattoos helped her.
“Each tattoo was a fresh start. The needle that pounded and pricked, the ink that was dragged down into the dermis. My skin was reimagined, quite literally redrawn. When I looked in the mirror, when others looked at me, I was no longer the girl who was pared and peeled. I was the woman who said: ‘No more, never again. You won’t claim me, you can’t, because I’ve claimed myself.’”
Elle
Terri White has started a new Coming Undone podcast, named for her memoir, which is out in paperback tomorrow! In it she talks to people about their stories of struggle, and of putting themselves back together. The first episode is an interview with the Rev. Richard Coles. Download the podcast now, or listen on Spotify.
‘On good nights, I lost my phone. On bad nights, I lost my sanity’
As Terri White’s memoir Coming Undone is published, this harrowing and incredibly powerful extract has run in the Guardian. It’s about what it was like to grow up with abuse, and then move across the world – to the dream job, in the dream city – only to still struggle, chaotically, with drink and with pain.
Terri White
Guardian