It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping: Interpreting the Language of Our Fathers Without Repeating Their Stories

An honest and lyrical coming-of-age memoir of growing up in South Africa at the height of apartheid, and an invitation to confront our inherited traumas and prejudices so that we may heal the sins of our fathers—from the bestselling author of Never Unfriended

Lisa-Jo Baker knows how burdened we can feel by the weight of the past. Born white in the heart of Zululand during the height of apartheid, her longing to write a new future for her children set her on a journey to understand how she fit into a story of violence and faith, history and race. Before marriage and motherhood, she came to the United States to study to become a human rights advocate. When she naively walked right into America's own turbulent racial landscape, she experienced the kind of painful awakening that is both individual and universal, personal and communal. Yet years would go by before she traced this American trauma back to her own South African past.

Baker was a teenager when her mother died of cancer, leaving her with her father. Though they shared a language of faith and justice, she often feared him, unaware that his fierce temper had deep roots in a family’s and a nation’s pain. Decades later, old wounds reopen when she finds herself spiraling into a terrifying version of her father, screaming herself hoarse at her son. Only then does Baker realize that to go forward—to refuse to repeat the sins of our fathers—we must first go back.

Stretching from South Africa’s Outback to Washington, D.C., It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping invites readers to look at their inherited hurts and prejudices. It's also a hope-filled guide for all who feel lost in life, worried they’re too off-course to make the necessary corrections. Baker assures you, it's never too late to be free.