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“A richly told adventure that explores the meaning of family and the power of grit.” —Kirkus Reviews February 19, 2021
The title, The Strongbox, conjures up so much – not only is it a vessel to hold information your mother had, it also feels like you are the ‘strongbox’ in this story – brave, resilient and determined.
She Writes Press
Investigating her family of origin story, TSH refused to be dismissed by the culture of silence that surrounded her biological father. With probing curiosity she dared to ask who was her father and why was he never a part of her life. The unexpected answers come as the result of her tenacity, candor, and compassion. Truth-seekers everywhere will find and enjoy a kindred spirit in The Strongbox.
David Talbot — Bestselling author of Season of the Witch and other books
Fearless, tender, and inspiring—The Strongbox is everything you most wish for in a memoir. Terry Sue Harms explores a history of pain, loss, and self-invention with eloquence and searing insight. An absorbing and deeply fulfilling book.
Jasmin Darznik — New York Times bestselling author of The Good Daughter
Harms’ detective-like determination helps her unravel the truths about her family history. This story is a brave exploration about the complexities of family and—ultimately—leads to Harms finding closure in ways she never imagined.
Melissa Cistaro, author of the award-winning memoir Pieces of My Mother
A complex tale about deception and revelation as profoundly confessional as The Liars’ Club, and a great job of storytelling. In The Strongbox, reluctant sleuth Terry Sue Harms sifts through clues to a dark past in a relentless probe for identity.
Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of Dead Love and Navigating the Divide
Self Help Success Story!
Strongbox is detective story. It is a memoir. It is a DIY self help book. It is a feminist manifesto that addresses class. Our detective is Terry Sue Harms.
Terry writes good sentences that beckon the reader onward to the last page. She is not cliche or flourished. Her story is compelling and told with surgical precision and compassion. She knows the power of words. She was illiterate until she was a young adult. The emotional and psychic pain she suffered from that and growing up in an extremely dysfunctional alcoholic “family” is almost unbearable to read. Every determined step she makes to find her biological father, to improve herself and her life makes you stand up and cheer. It not a miracle but love and blistering honesty that makes her succeed. Her love for life, people, and herself.
Her ability to focus and dogged determination should be a lesson to us all to live and love as fully as author Terry Sue Harms has.
MS (five star review on Amazon Books)
A Quest
Terry Sue Harms was on a quest. That quest, for answers concerning her paternity, ultimately encompassed most of her life. The Strongbox: Searching for My Absent Father is a compelling read. Family history mysteries are one of my favorite genres and this one is an excellent story.
Harms was deprived of a stable home life. Her parents abused alcohol and provided no emotional support. After losing her mother when she was 16, Harms made her own way in the world. The only clues to her biological father were documents she retrieved from her mother's strongbox. She mined information on numerous occasions while sleuthing for answers.
I admired the author's tenacity and gumption on her search. While her biological father remained elusive she was able to communicate with a few family members, through her own sheer perseverance. Ultimately, after forty years of searching, hiring private detectives, and researching historical documents, Harms gleaned a more complete pictures of the relationship between her biological father and mother. Many gaps remained and the author recognized and reconciled with the fact that much of the information she sought would remain unknown.
While her quest for the truth about her father formed a parameter of her life, Harms also searched for her own self worth. She struggled with alcohol, which appears to be a hereditary trait. Estranged from her siblings, she created her own family with good friends and her husband's family. Writing her memoir served as a catharsis, expunging some of the hurt, frustration, disappointment, and angst associated with her search. Harms' memoir is a good lesson in not allowing family lineage and history to define a person, but to determine one's own path in spite of voids from the past.
Story Circle Book Review (five stars) - Janilyn Kocher
An inherently fascinating memoir written with all the dramatic flair of a cliff-hanger novel, "The Strongbox: Searching for My Absent Father" is an extraordinary story and one that is especially and unreservedly recommended…
Midwest Book Review—Mary Cowpers
Highly recommended! A compelling and inspiring read.
I do most of my pleasure reading in bed, and I found myself eager to pick up The Strongbox, night after night, as the story unfolded. I knew from the book description that author Terry Sue Harms would come out okay in the end—despite setbacks that would have broken many: neglectful parents, a stepdad who called her a bastard, the death of her mother when she was sixteen, running away from home, dropping out of high school, and exposure to drugs. But how? I kept reading to find out. She wrote honestly about her vulnerabilities but kept me feeling safe along the way.
The author’s smooth, almost conversational story-telling drew me in and compelled me to read on. I marveled each time she pulled herself up: by completing beauty school, landing a steady job, teaching herself to read, taking college courses, graduating from Mills College. I cheered with her along the way.
The unifying thread is her search for her biological father—a married man who paid child support but had no interest in contacting her or in responding to her outreach. Each time she searches her mother’s strongbox, she finds out more, but of course it is never enough. The ending provides a lovely and satisfying twist.
Dori Jones Yang, journalist and author of When The Red Gates Opened –and others (five star review on Goodreads)
Step By Step
This memoir stands out because it makes the reader believe all things are possible. It is almost a guidebook for making small and large changes in our lives. Step by step, the author shows the reader how new and learned self-awareness brings about the right results. We can all use lessons when it comes to making our own luck and then recognizing and appreciating our accomplishments.
Terryfan (five star review at Barnes & Noble)
Everyday crimes parents commit and get away with!
I could not put it down! I have known Terry, the author, for years. And I knew nothing about her story. How does one exactly review someone's soul and flesh written on paper? This is one of those stories. Terry wrote this in the most straightforward way possible. Some stories can only be told this way. And these are the stories that must be told and must be read. Everyday crimes and the injustices parents put their children through go by never to be addressed for a life time.
Highly recommend it. And I'm sure you know of someone you will need to share Terry's life story with.
Sawsan Obeid-Zeki (five star review on Amazon Books)
As a reporter, I’ve always been fascinated by the way people’s real-life stories are always more nuanced, and usually more surprising and rewarding, than anything we could imagine in fiction. Terry Sue Harms’ The Strongbox, about her exploration of the gaping hole in her childhood where her father would have been, is an engaging and thought-provoking example of that. Her account doesn’t have the obvious storybook ending - it’s more real, and more satisfying, than that. It’s a story of where resilience and clear-headed focus can get you in life, and the hardships they can help you out of. Terry seems to have huge supplies of both.
Ellen Knickmeyer — Journalist
Terry Sue Harms’ book, The Strongbox, is the most compelling thing I’ve read in years. The elements of this true story are fascinating in themselves: addiction, grinding poverty, abusive parenting, glamour, recovery, true romance, spirit rising strong and beautiful. But even more than the subject itself is the gripping and lyrical way she writes. This book has gotten a richer part of me to resonate, and I am so grateful. My half-century of work with trauma had my head nodding all the way through…this is not only the author’s story, but a light on the path for many many others as well.
Kathryn Page PhD — President at FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder)
Terry Sue Harms has written a mesmerizing book – all the more compelling because it is true. Her descriptions of her early years of poverty and separateness are the most challenging that one can imagine. Her grandmother and mother died at ages 42 and 43 – both alcoholics. Harms, at the age of 16, was left with a disengaged, alcoholic, and mentally unstable stepfather. The Strongbox describes her subsequent lifelong search to find her biological father and what she hoped might be the familial love she never attained in her childhood. The permutations of this search constitute a survival story pure and simple; a search framed by one woman’s grit, determination, drive, and eventually, self-actualization to overcome the significant obstacles of poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, lack of education, and complete lack of support. Beautifully written in first person narrative, Harms takes us with her on a life journey in which her gumption ultimately brings her to love and belonging.
Elizabeth Griego, PhD — Principal, Elizabeth Griego & Associates
As a blend of tragic pain with self-aware healing and personal insight, The Strongbox is not just a spectacular story, it's also a cathartic one. While making her way in the world, the narrator dialogues with her internal shaming voice, creating a character out of it to which we can all relate. Rejection, shame and insecurity are universal shadows we all have, and Terry, with her rough start in life, plucky curiosity, and intelligent drive, is beautifully aware of her shadows enough to look them in the face, to give them a voice, but not to let them run the show. The drama of the story unfolding turns pages for a reader eagerly from start to finish. The powerful way the story concludes fills the hollow that the reader developed along with the narrator, bringing both to a divine resolve that reminds us grace not only comes from God, but from our own power and how we respond to what life brings us.
Nicole Fuller — M.A.T, Holistic Health Coach
There are many memoirs where the author seems to "bleed on the page" as if instructed to transform the mundane heartaches, failures, and all-too-human self-serving decisions of others or themselves into acts so vile that only the Furies of Greek mythology can safely exhort the offenders. In The Strongbox, Terry Sue Harms (a most appropriate last name), instead, shines a light on the ordinary lives unduly harmed by the moments when the whispers of our better nature abandon us, or more likely, we it. This is an ordinary story of one woman's search for a father who could not or chose not to love her, and the fact that it is so ordinary, we hope, someday will seem extraordinary to all.
Taisha Rucker