Ashley ElleAt first glance, the phrase “what happens when tragedy strikes twice in the same house?” reads like a line from a crime thriller. But when Laura Burkett says it, it lands as a kind of dare. That sentence, lifted from the jacket copy of her debut memoir, signals the uneasy ground the book covers – and does so without ever promising simple resolution.
There’s a quiet power in the way Burkett speaks about This Is Not My Life. Leaning forward in a beautiful, light-filled Pittsburgh office, she pauses, not for emphasis, but to find the exact word that lets grief and resolve coexist. The memoir she’s published slips in and out of genres – memoir, detective story, elegy – yet it’s tethered to one truth: how do you live in the shadow of loss when the obvious answers vanish?
Burkett’s sister died suddenly at 33, a heartbreak that turns the walls of a shared home into silent interrogators. This Is Not My Life opens on that rupture: a domestic scene cracked by loss, and a sister – the author – who refuses to let the story end there.
What follows is memoir as reclamation and investigation. She steps into the frayed seams of memory and moves through them with sharpened empathy and curiosity.
“The idea came when I realized I was the last person living in my family who knew this story,” Burkett says. What began as a personal chronicle transformed into something stranger. “I kept asking: what else is being held back from me?” These questions propelled her into writing, but also into investigating the death of her sister, navigating suspicion, and stumbling into advocacy in real time.
The memoir refuses genre boundaries. It’s as much about the chill of unanswered questions as it is about the warmth of sisterhood. Yes, there is dark humor – a lifeline in the strangest and darkest moments – and there are no neat endings. Instead, reader and writer wander forward, together.
You won’t find sweeping retrospectives here. Instead, the prose lands in moments: a suddenly empty bedroom, the weight of things unspoken, a memory that flips. The book’s power lies in its ability to hold two things at once: grief and suspicion, tenderness and unease. It reads like a detective story in fragments, a love letter to sisterhood, and a testament to resilience.
What sets it apart isn’t just the emotional stakes, but the tight framing. The world shrinks to the immediate: family photos, phone conversations, lost routines. But within that small perimeter, the stakes feel epic.
Some memoirs steer toward catharsis. Burkett’s steers elsewhere. “It never crossed my mind that it might become a – a what, ‘healing journey’ memoir?” she asks, sounding surprised at the label. Instead, she leaned into uncertainty. “I’m writing so I can figure it out alongside whoever’s open to reading it.” And readers are noticing. The memoir earned Amazon bestseller status in the grief, true crime, and love and loss genres.
Here’s the truth: This Is Not My Life isn’t a tidy memoir, and that’s its strength. It’s not driven by closure, but by curiosity – and by the fact that sometimes, living is the only way forward.
Why It Works: The tone shifts: one moment suffused with grief, the next wry and knowing. The structure resists linearity, mirroring how trauma fractures memory. The voice is embodied, never given over to cliché or melodrama.It’s a book that sits with you in the silences. You’ll find yourself rereading lines because they don’t settle easily – and that’s deliberate. Burkett isn’t after settling; she’s asking you to stay unsettled too.
This Is Not My Life isn’t an easy read, but it’s one that feels necessary. It’s about what happens when your life fractures, and the pieces don’t seem to fit anymore. Yet from the fissures comes voice – and that voice is uncompromising and clear.
For anyone who has ever questioned whether writing could recall what’s been lost – or transform it – this book is a rare kind of mirror.
This Is Not My Life is available for purchase on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble
