Home Is Within You

In this deeply personal memoir, Nadia Davis addresses her three sons with brutal honesty, hope, and strength, revealing both her childhood and adult traumas that led to issues with addiction and dysfunctional relationships, as well as to discuss transformational healing, spirituality, intensive trauma therapy, chronic pain management, healthy co-parenting and intimacy, preventing learned toxic masculinity, and more.

As a young high-profile lawyer, school board member in Southern California, county supervisor in the Bay Area, recipient of state and national public service awards, and former wife of California's attorney general and treasurer, Nadia Davis has been a public figure in California for over two decades. Her experience with addiction in the trenches of a highly publicized abusive relationship led Davis through the challenges of public shaming, injustice, arrests, mandated treatment, and a total lack of privacy for personal issues.

Home Is Within You details her courageous journey towards wholeness and health as a woman, mother, and former spouse/co-parent in a powerful homage to finding one’s truth and worth. It is also a defense of privacy and motherhood, as well as a call to action against shaming of women and ineffective, often damaging policies towards families struggling with mental health and addiction, with suggestions for more compassionate methods of treatment and restorative justice enabling those struggling to ultimately find their personal truth and strength within.

Praise for Home Is Within You

“A memoir of healing from trauma and addiction from a well-known West Coast political figure....With admirable candor, she shares a story of resilience, delving into childhood and adult traumas, including a nearly fatal car accident and difficulties involving a stalker, and tells how she worked to overcome intense feelings of “shame, fear, and resentment.” Davis is an open and unwavering narrator who presents readers with explicit descriptions of sexual assault, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. The work touches on issues of privacy, motherhood, injustice, and mental health, including important criticisms of how addiction is criminalized and misunderstood.... A remembrance with a powerful message about strength and recovery...”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Methodical... powerful.... Centering motherhood, Home Is Within You is a delicate memoir about whole-person healing and its wider impact.”
— Clarion

“In these tender, urgent letters to her sons, Nadia Davis reveals her life, vulnerability, and journey toward healing. Home Is Within You is alive with Davis’s honesty and vulnerability, threading both her pain and the hard work of recovery and healing into its pages. Her frank accounts of grief, loss, and assault are upsetting, but the memoir’s hopeful trajectory sees Davis—’that little bright-eyed brown girl who simply wanted to save the world but sometimes hid in the closet’—building a thriving career, giving back to the community, and finding the strength to face trauma head on.”
— BookLife

“Home Is Within You is one of the best memoirs I have ever read… The most admirable thing is the candidness and how truthfully the author has written all her life experiences including her family history and all the things she went through including tough and heartbreaking experiences like racial bullying during her childhood… I just loved reading this memoir, it broke my heart at some points and it was just so wholesome at other points. I would totally recommended it if you are looking for a candid, well-written memoir.”
— Books & Associates

“I felt that this book made me very emotional from time to time because I am a family person and I love my people a lot. Some instances made me realise how lucky I am and I should thank God for everything he has given to me abundantly.”
— Rash Reads

“This book is very well written, you’ll enjoy turning each page. It is a journey of self discovery, with detailed and explicit descriptions. The young female attorney travels an arduous path to find her soul. It is gripping and filled with emotion. A difficult path survived.”
— Travel Deep into a Soul