My Family Divided: One Girl's Journey of Home, Loss, and Hope

Guerrero presents her life’s story of success as the result of her ability to use her trauma and experiences of adversity as a driver for learned self-worth, ambition, and positivity. Showing how she experienced and overcame considerable challenges forms part of the memoir’s social motivation as an exemplar and call-to-action: “Knowing that we are fighting on the right side gives us hope” (4). Guerrero’s own happy ending takes on a message of collective improvement; the brighter future of the narrative trajectory is mirrored by the book’s message for positive social change.

The chronological nature of the memoir supports the book as an example of how repeated experiences of trauma can be transformed into action for positive change, for oneself and others. Although Diane was always portrayed as being aware of some risk to her family, the true extent of her trauma and anxiety arguably began when she was seven years old and threatened to call the police on her arguing parents. Her mother warned her that the police would take both of her parents away, and it hit Diane that her life and everything she knew was in a fragile and vulnerable state: “For the first time, I realized that with one phone call, I could lose the most important people in the world to me” (33).