Sometimes It Takes the Broken to Break the Cycle. This item is unavailable.Sometimes It Takes the Broken to Break the Cycle

In this raw and unflinching work of autofiction, Casper E. Vale traces a childhood marked by poverty, violence, and silence, and the long, uneven road toward breaking free. Born to two people bound more by anger than affection, his earliest memories are fragments of survival: a patchwork teddy bear from a hospital visit, sagging porches in a trailer park, holidays that ended in fights, and a boy trying his best to stay unseen.

Yet even in the darkest moments, there were fragile threads of light. The steady hands of grandparents. The fleeting good days with a father who sometimes tried. The love of a woman who believed when he could not.

Told in lean, haunting prose, Sometimes It Takes the Broken to Break the Cycle explores how trauma reshapes memory and how survival can become legacy. More than memoir, it is a meditation on resilience, faith, and the quiet strength it takes to choose a different way forward.

For readers of Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’ and fans of Southern literary storytelling, this is a story of scars, survival, and hope.