Let the Tornado Come (eBook)

From an award-winning poet comes this riveting, gorgeous memoir about a young runaway, the trauma that haunted her as an adult, and the friendship with a horse that finally set her free.
When she was eleven years old, Rita began to run away. Her father's violence and her mother's hostility drove her out of the house and into the streets in search of a better life. This soon led her into a dangerous world of drugs, predatory older men, and the occasional kindness of strangers, but despite the dangers, Rita kept running. One day she came upon a field of horses galloping along a roadside fence, and the sight of them gave her hope. The memory of their hoofbeats stayed with her.

Rita survives her harrowing childhood to become a prize-winning writer and the wife of a promising surgeon. But when she is suddenly besieged by terrifying panic attacks, her past trauma threatens her hard-won happiness and the stable, comfortable life she's built with her husband. Within weeks, she is incapacitated with fear—literally afraid of her own shadow. Realizing that she is facing a life of psychological imprisonment, Rita undertakes a journey to find help through a variety of treatments. It is ultimately through chasing her childhood passion for horses that she meets a spirited, endearing horse named Claret—with his own troubled history—and together they surmount daunting odds as they move toward fear and learn to trust, and ultimately save, each other.

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Hailed as a clear-eyed book written with poetry and compassion by The Boston Globe, Let the Tornado Come is the lyrical debut memoir (Kirkus Reviews) of a runaway child, the woman she became, and the horse that set her free.When Rita Zoey Chin was eleven years old, she began running away from home. Her parents violence and neglect drove her onto the streets in search of a better life, but what she found instead was a dangerous world of drugs and predatory menas well as the occasional kindness of strangers. As she hits bottom and then learns to forge a new life for herself, all of her dreams of freedom and beauty pivot on a single, precious memory: a herd of horses running along a roadside fence.A few years later, Ritanow a prizewinning poet and wife of a successful neurosurgeonappears to have triumphed over her harrowing childhood, until she is struck with a series of debilitating panic attacks that threaten her comfortable new life. Ultimately, it is the memory of those hoofbeats, and the chance arrival of a spirited, endearing horse named Claret who has a difficult history himself, that will finally save her.A near euphoric ode to the human spirit (Huffington Post), Let the Tornado Come is about pulling yourself up out of the dark and discovering that the greatest escape lies not in running from, but turning towards, those things that frighten you the most; it is luminousA haunting yet hopeful saga that shows how trauma and fear can transform themselves into enduring strength (Publishers Weekly).