About On the Ledge

In 1957, when she was four years old, Amy Turner’s father attempted suicide by stepping onto a fifty-foot high ledge outside his hotel room. The story was quickly captured by news media and shared nationwide. Though her father was talked back inside by a passerby priest, from then on Turner walked a tightrope between her father’s mental illness and her mother’s struggle to maintain her sobriety. Worry and anxiety shadowed her childhood.

As an adult, Turner believed that years of therapy had put her childhood in its place—well behind her. A lawyer-turned-middle school teacher, she enjoyed a happy marriage and had two wonderful sons. But her view of herself, “as a pillar of emotional stability,” was eventually shattered after a near fatal accident in which she was hit head-on in a crosswalk. Unable to avoid the truck, Turner felt a release, a freedom, a letting go of the fears she still carried—and realized her childhood issues were unresolved. 

With the unexpected death of her gifted yet troubled brother two months after the accident, her experiences with a practitioner of Chinese medicine and Somatic Experiencing, and her inescapable feeling that grace was at play in her life, Turner, although initially resistant, will gain the strength to investigate the shadowy details about that moment on the ledge.

In this insightful, compassionate, and sometimes even funny examination of intergenerational trauma, she describes how healing from the trauma of the accident revealed deeply buried wounds from her scarred childhood, wounds that made it difficult for her to create an identity separate from her father’s painful history. Her journey is an engaging and touching account of triumphing over trauma and of finally finding oneself.