Balancing Act: Memoir of a Teenage Breakdown
In the 1970s, outside the small town of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, thirteen-year-old Barbara Ann is starting grade seven at a new school. Like many teenage girls, she wants the right hair, the right clothes, the right friends, the right boyfriend—and, ultimately, love and happiness.
She believes all of it is within reach. The only thing standing in her way, she thinks, is her over-controlling mother.
As Barbara Ann pushes against her mother's boundaries, every attempt at independence becomes another power struggle. Then she meets a boy and believes, at last, that everything she has dreamed of is coming true.
Instead, her world shatters.
Desperate to escape the pain, Barbara Ann finds herself sinking deeper into anxiety and depression until she reaches what she and those around her understand as a nervous breakdown. But in the midst of her emotional collapse, she discovers a painful truth about her mother—and realizes just how much she has lost.
Balancing Act takes readers inside the emotional world of a teenage girl struggling with anxiety, loss, grief, depression, first love, and the complicated bonds between mother and daughter. It is a story of innocence lost, betrayal uncovered, and the difficult beginnings of finding the inner strength to carry on.
Each book in the Barbara by the Bay memoir series stands on its own and can be read in any order.
