The Girl Who Named Herself

Every night, Jaime closes her shop and returns to the bedside of Lorene, the woman who raised her. Lorene asks, “Are you the girl who brings the towels?” No one else comes.

As a child in a house below a Chicago highway, Jaime learned hunger and the two words that followed her from home to home: don’t tell. Then, at a police station, she chose a name for herself. It belonged to the tall, strong officer who set a whole sandwich within reach and let her eat, and the girl needed that strength badly enough to borrow it. Later, in an orphanage, a nun called her too ugly to be chosen, and Jaime traced J-A-I-M-E in the fog on a window.

Even Glenn, the husband who knows her best, knows almost nothing about the child she was. Now Lorene’s memory is failing, and just the steam of a supper cart can drive Jaime into the cold, palms flat on her car roof. Jaime can keep the silence that got her through and stay half a stranger to her husband, or tell Glenn and break her oldest rule: don’t tell.

The Girl Who Named Herself is an ultimately hopeful standalone novel, inspired by true events, about surviving a childhood meant to erase her, choosing who she is, and finally breaking the silence.