What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo is a Malaysian-born American journalist, producer, and the author of What My Bones Know. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in only two years, after which she started her own podcast, Get Me on This American Life, garnering the attention of another radio program, Snap Judgement. After working as an intern and then as a producer at Snap Judgment, Foo was hired as a radio journalist for This American Life. She quit her job shortly after being diagnosed with C-PTSD in 2018. Foo has been nominated for three Daytime Emmy awards and won a 2015 Webby Award. She is a fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Foo moved from Malaysia to San Jose, California at the age of two, when her father was hired to work for a tech company in Silicon Valley. Growing up, she was physically and emotionally abused by her mother and occasionally by her father. In middle school, her mother divorced her father and Foo chose to live with him. When Foo was in high school, her father remarried and abandoned her. Her traumatic childhood caused her to develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD.