Singer-Songwriter Orenda Fink Breaks Her Mother’s Spell in Haunting New Memoir

“The scenes that I write about in the book are essentially my only memories. It’s almost like those traumatic memories were just seared into my brain with a lot of detail and I really don’t remember much else,” Azure Ray singer-songwriter Orenda Fink says of her new memoir, The Witch’s Daughter: My Mother, Her Magic, and the Magic That Bound Us.

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These memories, from her harrowing childhood in Alabama to the booming music scene in places like Athens, Georgia and Omaha, Nebraska, center not on herself, but Fink’s frenetic mother, who she describes as suffering from borderline personality disorder and alcoholism. Fink grew up in her mother’s “upside down world,” accustomed to disturbing revelations like a bottle of blood tucked away in a dark closet, drunken outbursts blamed on ghosts, and discovering her mother’s distressing diary that read like “a horror movie.” But as a child, Fink never associated her mother’s inexplicable behavior with mental illness or addiction, instead she believed her mother to be magic. “From a child’s perspective, you don’t think your mother’s crazy. You think she’s a God,” says Fink. “You think that this is the way the world is, or maybe the world’s against us, but your mother is everything and you worship her.” Like a small henchman, as she describes her younger self, who her mother nicknamed “Little Magic,” Fink’s reality became distorted, clouded by her mother’s menthol cigarette smoke and lies, including about her mother’s own childhood sexual abuse, that she passed down to Fink like family heirlooms.

Despite having endured her mother’s abuse for years, never straying too far from her orbit even as an adult with a successful music career, Fink says she had never considered therapy until her dog, Wilson, died. “I basically had a nervous breakdown and went to therapy for the first time,” she says. She wrote about the loss of her dog and sent the pages to a writer friend, Timothy Schaffert. “I had one little paragraph about my mom in this 40 pages of grief about my dog, and he said, ‘This book is about your mother, it’s not about your dog,’” recalls Fink. She wrote on and off for years, not realizing she was weaving the fragments of her life into a memoir, unaware that eventually it would crescendo into the decision to cut off all communication with her parents. “It took me 20 years to figure out what the truth even was,” says Fink.

Disillusioned with her mother’s “magic,” she spent years writing and in therapy, dispelling the stories she grew up believing. Now Fink, a certified Jungian depth coach, who specializes in dream interpretation and shadow work, is finding the power to center herself. Ahead of the release of her memoir, The Witch’s Daughter: My Mother, Her Magic, and the Madness That Bound Us, Fink, calling from her home in Joshua Tree, reflects on her turbulent childhood, going no contact with her parents, and finding healing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: One of the looming and omnipresent fears you write about is being “x’d,” or cut off from your family by your mother. Did you have any reservations or fears associated with that about sharing your family’s story publicly for the first time?

Orenda Fink: The truth is I don’t want to hurt my parents and they’re still alive. I really had to make a decision: Do I want to speak my full truth? I think this is probably the question a lot of memoirists have to ask themselves. Your truth may hurt some other people because they’ve hurt you and you’re expressing that and how do you move forward with that? That would be my biggest anxiety, that I don’t want to hurt them, but yet at the same time, this is the story that they were huge players in. Otherwise I feel pretty confident and I hope people understand that the intention is for them to be seen and heard and not feel as isolated as one is when they are the child of a parent struggling with mental illness or substance abuse issues.

What did your sister, Christine, think?

The anxiety really comes from wanting to protect my parents, which I spent my lifetime doing and I’m going to therapy about that and I would say for my sister that’s the same. There’s no malicious intent with a memoir, even though we do realize for our own mental health we needed to go no contact. We still love them.

Did you receive any pushback from anyone else in your family?

Zero.

Was that freeing?

It was very affirming. [My mother’s own brother and my nephew] both read the book very early on when it was still in the editing process for veracity and for permission. They had the option to take their name out and they both chose to keep their name in and were very encouraging. I think it was affirming for them too. By nature of the process, it’s like even though I lost my parents, I gained these other two family members in a very profound way. I was actually kind of shocked by how encouraging everyone has been about it honestly.

Something that struck me was that your mother gifted you your first guitar. Ironically, music is what became your ticket out of town.

I never really thought of it that way until I wrote the memoir. I had to admit this was a gift from her and it was hard because it’s easy to just make her the villain all the time, but she wasn’t a villain. No one’s a villain all the time. Ultimately it ended up being one of the biggest gifts I’ve ever gotten. It is kind of ironic that I don’t think she really knew that she was basically handing me a train ticket: “I’m going to take this beat up guitar and get out of here with it.” Who would’ve thought?

Amid your rising success with Azure Ray, from touring the country and Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone features to dinner parties with Courtney Love, your mother was still wreaking havoc on your life in the background. Are you still able to look back at that time in your life with joy and pride?

Yes, absolutely. I cherish all those years, and there were hard times too, but I cherish them. When I say that my musical family is a family, that’s absolutely true. Even if I don’t keep making records, they are my family. They are a second family to me. It’s almost like how could I not look back on all of that fondly? It saved my life really.

Did you ever consider that the medium through which you told your family’s story would be an album and not a memoir?

It never occurred to me to do a record about this instead of the book because I felt like this was a pivotal crossroads for me in making that decision where I just knew as an artistically inclined person, writing a record was not the right medium for this. It just was going to require a lot of words and a lot of more nuance.

I wrote [music] about my family a lot. I just didn’t really talk about it that much in the press. “Easter Island” is a song off my first solo record that’s literally about that scene where I picked my mother up off the glass and put her to bed. The song “Lorraine,” off of Drying Down the Moon, “How will You Survive,” off the first record is about my sister. There’s just so many [about my family]. I was thinking I should put together a playlist for the book, so I need to do that now.

Now that the book, with the nuance and your truth, is out, would you do an album?

I don’t think so. I feel like I might be moving towards writing, so I think there’ll be another book. I’m not sure what it is yet, but probably not a record.

Throughout the book you’re very careful to not paint your mother as crazy or hysterical, which a lot of women who were struggling with mental illness and addiction were labeled as at the time. There’s a compassion and unwavering love that’s very present, even as you reveal the ugly truth. Was that something you were mindful of?

I am so happy that it reads like that to you because I didn’t want to make her the villain or crazy person. But honestly it wasn’t like that was my prime motive in how I chose my words.

Even though it is a tricky thing to write about a diagnosis of someone who hasn’t been diagnosed, and I do honestly truly believe that she has borderline personality disorder, but she will never be diagnosed, and I think that’s an important conversation to have without it being gatekept by the medical community. Because what that did was it made me understand it’s not, oh, she’s crazy. It’s like, no, this is a studied, very specific mental illness and this is what it looks like and this is why the behaviors don’t make sense to people who don’t have the disorder, and here’s what you can do to protect yourself or get help.

The book ends with your decision to go no contact with your parents. I have to imagine that it’s a daily struggle. How are you handling that challenge?

It is a daily struggle, and that’s why I think it is such an intense and heavy decision to have to make. There’s this great therapist who talks a lot about no contact and childhood narcissistic abuse named Patrick Teahan, and something that he says that I think about a lot and especially in regards to this book, is that no one makes this decision lightly. Someone pretty much has to go through hell to decide to go no contact with their parents. It’s very difficult. The question is, what is your responsibility to your parent versus your own mental wellbeing? The decision has helped my sister and I in immeasurable ways, but it’s still very painful.

Has the book coming out next week brought up any of those feelings for you?

Yeah, definitely. And wondering if they’ll read it and if they’ll reach out through the mail because certainly they can mail a letter. That’s the interesting thing about having gone no contact with my parents for two years. We did block them from email and text, but they could write a letter and they actually don’t even know that we went no contact, I never said, I’m going no contact with you. So in some ways I feel like they kind of went no contact with us.

Right, it’s a two-way street. You split your story up into four phases: despair, denial, purgatory, and acceptance. With the book out next week, what phase of life do you feel like you’re in now?

They are the stages of recovery from narcissistic abuse, and there are a couple more after acceptance, which would be the rebuilding and then the thriving. Where I left off I felt like was the acceptance because it really kind of was like, okay, we’re buttoning this up finally, this is the last chapter of this, but what is next? I don’t know, I’d say the rebuilding and then you want to hope to get to the thriving.