Author: Tracy McKay
Title: The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope
Publisher: BCC Press
Publication Year: 2017
Genre: Memoir
(Reviewed by Conor Hilton)
Tracy’s memoir is powerful—filled with beauty and pain and darkness and light and love and suffering and so much overwhelming grace and hope. She plays with time, slipping back and forth between moments lends the memoir an ability to capture the depth of her feeling for Dave and the beauty and love involved in their relationship alongside his addiction. The memoir is absolutely worth everyone’s time in capturing the quiet ways in which community and support matters and the beauty of a religious and faith community helping out. I loved the third-person interludes interspersed throughout the book, capturing the different ways in which we experience difficult moments and distance ourselves from times in life that we don’t otherwise know how to handle. I was moved to tears over and over again at the pain Tracy and her family experienced, the depth of her love for her children and Dave, the repeated acts of service on their behalf, and the constant sense of grace and hope that pervades the whole seemingly bleak and hopeless situation.