In the preface to her memoir, Holler, Danielle Chapman writes, “When you set out to write to the people, or to rail against those people, they become the whetstone for your words, and they are always less exacting than the crags of your own consciousness.” It is with this brutal honesty that Chapman, a daughter of Tennessee who now teaches creative writing at Yale, mines the formative years of her life. With her we ride an emotional roller coaster where we love, then hate, then love again the souls who have left deep imprints on her identity: a father lost to the sea when she was young; a mother determined to keep living for Chapman’s sake but captive to the past; a military grandfather who seems emblematic of outdated values but turns out to be more progressive and empathetic than anyone would have guessed; family friends who appear to be walking stereotypes of the Old South and blind military devotion but who are as complex as anyone else with a traumatic history and contradictory impulses.

There are neither angels nor demons here, neither total acceptance nor outright condemnation.