I am the child of an abandoned woman. My father left our family when I was 12 and I will never forget the pain and heartache his decision had on my mother. But the great thing about my mother was that she didn’t let a ruined marriage destroy her love for self or love for God. An Abandoned Woman: Found by God, by Charese Nicole, is probably the closest I could ever get to how my mother actually felt without hearing it from her personally. I was immediately impressed in the beginning with Ms. Nicole’s pain and self-doubt as a woman who felt that she had given her husband everything a man could want and then some. But like most women in this country, she forgot to leave the best part to God: her joy and spirit.

Ms. Nicole’s honesty about her feelings and desires in many ways over powers her memoir. The last few chapters are more of a reflection of her talks with God and rightly so, but I found myself wanting to know more about the details of her interactions with her former husband and even with other people. I wanted to see exactly where in these interactions God was working on her because her pain was so profound that it might leave some readers who are not familiar with God wondering how could she have “come through” so quickly and so assured. When she came home that day to find that her husband had taken all of the furniture, everything, I wanted to read more about how she explained that to her children. How does one explain that to the children? There has to be more to the story.

But what I can honestly say about Ms. Nicole’s memoir is that it definitely paints the picture of how deeply painful it is to be abandoned by someone who professes to love you. Her poem, “Questions,” clearly outlines the movement of her thoughts as she was going through her crisis. Each question is packed with resentment, pain, humiliation and dare I say, despair and anger at God for not providing her with the questions.

Abandoned Woman reads more like a rehashing of a dialogue she had with God and self than a memoir, but that’s its strong point in many ways. However, there definitely needs to be more to the story because the pain of retelling it warrants it. I rejoiced at the fact that she learned what real joy is and that she reconnected with a God who loves her unconditionally. Ms. Nicole has done well with her memoir, but I want her to give us more. And that is the mark of a good writer: when the author leaves the reader wanting to know more.