The Girl No One Wanted to Understand is the unapologetic story of a girl discarded by everyone—family, systems, society—who clawed her way back from addiction, prison, and unspeakable trauma. It’s not a tale of rescue. It’s a reckoning. Raw, real, and unforgettable, this memoir dares to say what others won’t: survival is messy, but so is truth.
Ended
Every year, over 2.3 million women cycle through America's criminal justice system, and 86% have histories of sexual violence. Millions more battle addiction while trying to raise children, caught in an endless loop of judgment, relapse, and family rejection. Yet most recovery memoirs follow the same sanitized arc: rock bottom, treatment, redemption, happy ending. What's missing are the raw, unfiltered stories of women still fighting—the ones who don't get clean and stay clean in a neat timeline, who face ongoing trauma while trying to mother their own children, who discover that surviving abuse is just the beginning of a much longer war. These women desperately need to see themselves reflected authentically, without the Instagram-perfect recovery narrative that makes them feel like failures when healing isn't linear.
The Girl No One Wanted to Understand* shatters every myth about survival, recovery, and what it means to "overcome." This isn't another triumphant addiction memoir—it's the story of a woman who survived childhood rape, lost custody of her children multiple times, faced down death by overdose and domestic violence, and discovered that healing happens in messy, imperfect cycles. Through unflinching honesty and poetic vulnerability, this memoir provides what no clinical guide can: proof that you can be broken and worthy simultaneously. Readers will discover:
• **Survival isn't linear**—relapse doesn't erase progress, and healing happens in spirals, not straight lines
• **Family dysfunction runs deeper than addiction**—how generational trauma passes through bloodlines and how to stop the cycle
• **Worth isn't earned through perfection**—you don't have to be "fixed" to deserve love and belonging
• **Motherhood while healing**—the complex reality of raising children while still learning how to live
• **The difference between surviving and living**—and how to transition from one to the other, even when the world keeps pushing you backward
I didn't just research trauma and addiction—I lived it, survived it, and continue to navigate it daily. After cycling through juvenile detention, prison, homelessness, and multiple relapses, I've maintained sobriety while rebuilding my relationship with my daughters and creating the stable home I never had. I earned my Associate's Degree on the Dean's List while battling PTSD, and I've successfully challenged the narrative that women like me are disposable. My story isn't just personal—it's political. It's proof that the women society writes off as "lost causes" are actually warriors in disguise. I have the scars, the wisdom, and most importantly, the courage to tell the whole truth—not just the pretty parts that make people comfortable, but the raw, necessary parts that might save someone's life.
This book is written for adult women ages 25 to 45 who have experienced childhood trauma, addiction, incarceration, or family estrangement, and are seeking raw, honest stories of survival and emotional validation from someone who’s lived it.
Taneille Coomer is a survivor of what most people don’t speak about—abandonment, childhood abuse, addiction, incarceration, and the kind of generational trauma that buries people in silence. Born from a secret and raised in chaos, she spent years trapped in cycles of pain, navigating a system that punished her survival instead of understanding it. From losing custody of her children to nearly losing her life, her story isn’t polished—it’s real.
Now rebuilding her life with raw honesty, Taneille writes not as a professional expert, but as someone who crawled out of hell with her truth intact. Her memoir, The Girl No One Wanted to Understand, is her first book—an unfiltered portrait of pain, persistence, and reclaiming your voice when the world has already written you off. She tells her story for the ones still stuck, still scared, still surviving—so they know they’re not alone.
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Chapter One: The Edge of Everything
They were ready to zip me up in a body bag when the coroner found the faintest pulse buried somewhere in my gray, cold body.
I had been lying on that bathroom floor for three and a half hours before I was finally found—no breath, no heartbeat, nothing. The EMTs couldn't find a pulse. The police had already called it. I was gone, another overdose statistic in a small Indiana town, another girl who didn't make it out.
But something—call it stubbornness, call it unfinished business, call it my daughters still needing their mother—kept the smallest flicker of life burning somewhere deep inside me. The coroner checked one more time, found that thread-thin pulse, and suddenly they were rushing me to the emergency room, pumping Narcan straight into my heart.
When I woke up with heating pads draped over me, fighting to get my body temperature back up, I knew I had a choice to make. I could keep walking toward death, or I could finally start walking toward life.
But to understand how I got to that bathroom floor, you have to understand where it all began.
---
## Chapter Two: Better Off Without Him
I was born in 1976—the quiet kind of scandal no one wanted to name.
My mother fell for a man who specialized in beautiful lies. He told her he was single, free, available. She believed him because what else do you do when someone offers attention wrapped in charm? She didn't know about the wife waiting at home or the two sons already calling him "Daddy."
She found out when she told him she was pregnant.
That's when his mask slipped. That's when he said no.
No to me. No to her. No to the whole damn mess he'd helped create.
We were inconvenient. A miscalculation. A side effect. He made his choice and vanished like smoke.
When you're small, your life story is just silence at first—what you see, hear, feel. In our house, my father wasn't a person. He was a shadow no one discussed. When I asked, the answer was always the same:
"Don't worry about it."
"He ain't no good."
"You're better off without him."
I must have heard that line a hundred times, especially from my oldest sister—the one I loved most. She'd say it like a promise, like she could shield me from something. Maybe she did. Maybe that lie was the closest thing to truth I could hold.
We grew up tangled together—women and girls with no steady men, no lasting presence, just a mother trying to carry it all.
The missing pieces didn't hit me until second grade. Seven, maybe eight years old. Other kids drew families: stick figures holding hands, triangle rooftops, "I love you daddy" scrawled in crooked letters. I'd sit with my broken crayon and blank page, wondering what to draw. Who to include. What my father's voice sounded like. Whether he ever wondered about me.
All I got was silence and love that came with warnings.
"You're better off without him."
That sentence stalked me like a ghost, living in the cracks of my childhood. In the ache behind my ribs when someone said "dad." In the sting of being forgotten by someone who never tried to know me.
I had no picture of him. No phone number. No birthday cards or Christmas calls. Nothing. Not even a name I could say without flinching. When I pressed my mother for details—what he looked like, why he left—her eyes would flicker, harden, then slam shut.
"He doesn't matter," she'd say.
But he did matter. Not because of who he was, but because of who he wasn't. He wasn't there. Wasn't trying. Wasn't wondering if his daughter had a warm coat or bedtime stories or nightmares she couldn't name.
When someone's absence becomes that loud, it starts feeling like rejection carved into bone.
I carried that wound quietly, desperately—the way children carry pain they can't stop touching, even when it hurts. I learned to act unbothered, to laugh it off, to joke about "daddy issues" before I understood what that meant. I let people think I was tough. That I didn't care. That I didn't need him.
But I did need him. Not his money or guidance—I needed the kind of father who shows up. Who holds your hand in traffic. Who remembers school plays and scraped knees and birthdays.
Instead, I got emptiness. Silence that taught me I was disposable before I learned to speak.
They kept saying, "You're better off without him." Maybe they meant comfort. Maybe they thought it was protection. But to a little girl trying to color in a blank page, it felt like erasure.
He didn't just leave me.
He never chose me to begin with.
---
## Chapter Three: Four Daughters, No Fathers
Four of us girls, each with a different story and a different absent father.
Tammy had hers—though I don't remember him ever being around. Tina and Tracie shared one too, but his presence was equally invisible. Then there was me—the youngest, born from a lie, raised in silence. We were puzzle pieces that never quite fit.
My mom was always trying. I see that now. She raised all four of us alone, fighting through every month, every job, every heartbreak. She moved from man to man, searching for love, security, or just someone who wouldn't leave. But none stayed long enough to matter.
Marriages came and went like storms. Each time they ended, we'd pack up and move, or watch arguments fade to silence, and silence fade to another name we'd learn to call "Mom's boyfriend."
Mom worked herself raw—factory shifts, side jobs, bartending nights just to keep lights on and food in the fridge. She'd drag herself home exhausted, reeking of cigarettes and spilled beer, eyes heavy but still trying to smile for us.
We girls were all we had. We didn't always get along—we fought, screamed, slammed doors—but underneath the chaos, we knew. We were it.
No fathers with weekend plans or birthday presents. No child support checks. No visitations. No father-daughter dances. Just Mom, and us. When she couldn't be there, we tried holding each other up, even when none of us knew how.
Sometimes it felt like five separate lives under one roof: four daughters, each fatherless in our own way, and a mother carrying weight meant for two.
We wore our wounds differently. Tina got tough, armor-hard. Tracie turned inward, quiet—maybe afraid noise would make someone else leave. Tammy tried mothering us all, forced to grow up fastest.
And me? I was the baby. The afterthought. The one who arrived when hope had already packed its bags.
I tried making sense of it by pretending I was fine—laughing too loud, being the reckless one, the one who didn't care.
But I cared. We all did.
We just had nowhere to put it. No one talked about the ache, the longing, the confusion. We kept moving—new homes, new schools, new men who stayed just long enough to remind us not to trust anyone to stay.
I'd watch other kids sometimes—see them run into their fathers' arms after school, sit between parents at recitals—and something sharp would twist inside me. I didn't know what to call it then. Now I know: grief. Envy. Everything I didn't have.
No matter how hard Mom worked, that hole never closed. There's no substitute for a father who never shows up. No healing from a wound everyone insists doesn't exist.
We weren't just
four girls without fathers.
We were four girls trying to grow roots in soil already stripped bare.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“This book wrecked me in the best way. Taneille doesn’t just write a story — she bleeds on the page. Every chapter pulled me …
Thank you for sharing your story with us Taneille. Prayers for your continued healing.
Your very welcome, I'm glad to help and I'm very happy for all you've conquered, your journey isn't over it's only just beginning
Great Job!!! Been so excited for u to finish this. Can't wait to Read this!!!!!
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on July 20, 2025, 1:49 p.m.
Wishing all the best with your release!
on July 20, 2025, 9:38 p.m.
Thank you so much!