Title: A Bridge to the Mainland
Author: Veronica Knight
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-9845-8476-2
Genre: Memoir / Self-Help
Pages: 344
Reviewed by: Susan Brown

Read Book Review

Finding a way out of childhood trauma is a tortuous journey, one that many victims choose never to make. It takes courage to admit there’s a problem, tenacity to find a solution and someone to act as an advisor along the way. Author Veronica Knight had all three of these components which helped in her struggle to alter the destructive path she was on, and allow herself to redirect her life in a positive and promising direction as written in A Bridge to the Mainland.

After years of denial of her harmful behaviors which resulted in an addiction to opioids, Ms. Knight realized she needed help in identifying the cause of her addiction, and engaged in therapy to better understand her dependency. She wrote this book in her forties, encouraged by her doctors to keep a record of her progress and share it with others. It sat on a shelf for the next 40 years, until as she wrote, “The time would come when it was meant … to take if off the shelf, blow off the dust and finish it. The time is now with the opioid crisis.”
Although Ms. Knight says the book is not just about her, she gives voice to the perils that come with childhood trauma and domestic violence, which for her, led to depression, substance abuse, and ultimately addiction. Readers are privy, through her eyes, to the enormous effort it takes to stop behaviors detrimental to emotional and mental health and, instead, create responses that support self-care.

The groundwork for the author’s road to addiction was laid in childhood, where her feelings of self-doubt and insecurity were exacerbated by the dysfunction of her parent’s marriage. Love was a precious commodity, not given freely. Unfortunately, her own problematic marriage did little to minimize her feelings of inadequacy or her increasing dependence on drugs. She says of herself, “I am a regular person who became addicted to drugs because I didn’t have the courage or the knowledge to take charge of my life and to be positive.”

Her odyssey up-and-out of addiction was put into motion by her doctors, concerned with her excessive drug use, who encouraged her to seek out and enroll in a structured and intense therapy program. She did. With much help, she took control of her life … for the rest of her life. In spirt of all the traumatic particulars detailed by the author in this memoir it is, ultimately, a narrative that deals in hope in what for many can feel like hopeless situations. It’s a roadmap, that if followed, leads to living a more meaningful, honest and truthful life.

For those struggling with any type of addiction, albeit drugs or harmful environments or abusive situations, this memoir brings with it an instructive and helpful message that, if assimilated as a lifestyle, can lead to a way out.