Kelly Aiello, a Canadian author known as KJ Aiello, recently took to Instagram to share a deeply personal struggle involving her mother, from whom she has been estranged for 14 years. Aiello, the author of the award-winning book The Monster in the Mirror, Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell, found herself processing an alleged attack from her mother on the literary platform Goodreads. The situation is particularly striking because of Aiello’s work.
She described her book as a blended genre of memoir and cultural critique that explores how fantasy literature helped her process trauma. As Aiello noted in her post, “So of course, where there’s trauma, there’s usually family.” She explained her version of the story: that she had been “very generous with her family of origin,” attempting to understand their perspectives to find a sense of compassion. Then, her mother breached the boundary with a one-star review.
