Patchwork Someone: A Memoir

Lying in the emergency room, Jacinta realised it was time to start pulling the fragments of her life back together. Sometimes recovery means letting go. Patchwork Someone is a story about hitting rock bottom and finding the will to get back up again.

This book offers an absorbing insight into several worlds -- the Evangelical Church of the turn of the century; Expatriate Hong Kong in the years spanning its handover; a bi-racial, multicultural family; the plight of an overseas student; a fractured mind. It is a tale about a coming of age, and a more tentative kind of faith.

Praise for Patchwork Someone

A book that needs to exist: hopeful, but the corrective to every story of redemption too tidy and too narrow to hold the actual messiness of life.

- Francis Spufford, Golden Hill and Unapologetic.

Patchwork Someone, an unabashedly honest memoir, is both a coming-of-age chronicle and narrative portrait of an expatriate Hong Kong and third-culture world. Jacinta Read's revelatory self-examination does not pull punches. For this Eurasian, rebellious, free-spirited youth - she never quite fit into the privileged, confusingly unmoored and cosmopolitan world of her family and upbringing - her parents' liberal parenting style sent her on a "bumpy ride" of dislocation, wracking her with self-doubt. Her subsequent search for stability through religion and art, and her battle with bipolar disorder contribute to a journey marked by perpetual uncertainty. This is a courageous book by an indomitable spirit who creates her own path for living with uncertainty. A book for both the young (and not-so-young) who must come to terms with who they are, both inside and out.

- Xu Xi

'A powerful and funny tale of growing up in Hong Kong, told with charming frankness. Read takes a moment of personal crisis anduses it to spin a tale of life, love in its many forms, and growing up with that sense many of us share, that we are not "normal''.'

- Justin Hill, Sunday Times, Washington Post, and The Times Book of the Year

'Patchwork Someone is a fascinating and intimate account of family, faith and love: of struggling to find balance, overcoming obstacles and ultimately, making peace with the unknown.'

- Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

'It is rare for a book from the heart and spirit of a disciple of Christ to tell it like it is, and so penetrate the reader's being like an arrow striking the bull's eye. Jacinta's vivid, passionate and painful memoir is such a book. It will challenge you, tenderise you and also console you, because you too have dark places. But most of all it will fill you with new hope and courage. Enjoy this wonderful book, and let it speak freedom to you.'

- Anita Cleverly, Deep Night, Bright Morning; pastor, St. Aldates Church, Oxford 2002-2020