Jade G Thomas: The Girl Who Walked Out of The File, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

What happens when the story of your life begins in somebody else's handwriting?

Jade is still a baby when professionals begin recording her life. Before she can speak for herself, adults are already observing, assessing and documenting the world around her. Across hundreds of pages, social workers, teachers and other professionals record concerns, meetings, injuries, absences and decisions. They write about her mother. They write about her home. They write about Jade. But the child living inside those pages has a story the file cannot contain.

She remembers learning to read a room before she could properly read a book. She remembers hunger and violence, racism and silence, but also toast quietly placed on a plate, women who stayed, moments of ridiculous joy and the fierce imagination of a child determined to survive. She grows up, leaves school without qualifications, becomes a mother and eventually returns to education. The file closes. Her life does not.

Decades later, Jade opens those records again. Reading the official account alongside her own memories, she begins to question not only what happened to her, but who was allowed to decide what counted as truth. What did the adults see? What did they miss? What happens to the experiences that never make it onto the page? And what happens when the child who was written about grows up and writes back?

Told through memory, archival records and the gaps between them, The Girl Who Walked Out of the File is a memoir about childhood, care, race, class, motherhood and survival - and one woman's refusal to let an institutional record have the final word.