How many times do you have to break your own heart before you finally learn how to save it?

For years Yna believed that surviving her husband was the same thing as loving him. She learned how to sleep through thunder, bracing a heavy wooden bedframe against the bedroom door every night to protect her two-year-old daughter from a father drowning in cheap beer and quiet cruelty. She told herself this was just what endurance looked like. But when the barricade could no longer hold the terror out, she wrote her departure down on a piece of paper, took her little girl, and walked away.

Leaving, however, wasn't an arrival—it was only the prologue.

Starving for safety and desperate to give her daughter a real family, Yna mistook the intensity of a new relationship for rescue. Instead of finding sanctuary, she walked straight into a roaring fire. What followed was a darker, louder cage: two more children, relentless volatility, and the soul-crushing discovery that running from one broken home doesn't stop you from building another.

Even after reclaiming her independence and trying to do everything "right"—choosing stability over fireworks and leaning on faith—the hardest lesson was yet to come: a man doesn't have to slam doors to leave you completely alone.

Told with raw emotional candor, fractured memory, and hard-won grace, In My Own Genre is an intimate intimate memoir about displacement, repeated patterns, and motherly devotion. It is the unflinching story of a woman who spent a lifetime searching for love in the shadows of broken men—until she finally found the courage to step outside their scripts and write her own.