Healing from Trauma and Addiction Through Witchcraft in "Breaking the Curse"

Mike McClelland

June 17

The last time I got out of rehab, I bought two things: an Apple watch (because the people in rehab who secretly got texts and emails did so by smuggling in Apple watches, I thought I'd better have one if they sent me back) and a deck of tarot cards. Unlike Alex DiFrancesco, author of the elegant, honest, earnest new memoir Breaking the Curse: A Memoir About Trauma, Healing, and Italian Witchcraft, I have no ancestral links to witchcraft. But I was running out of options. We're programmed by society, trauma, and ourselves to think that magic and creativity are embarrassing things to be done in private, and certainly not things that can help our recovery. So when I picked up this book and found out DiFrancesco's journey into tarot was similar, I immediately felt less alone.

Feeling less alone is just one of the many abundant gifts of Breaking the Curse. The book is sharp and clear on a prose level, and it is swift and to-the-point. DiFrancesco begins with a prism-view of a young girl, a young boy, a nonbinary person, a little girl, a little boy, and then moves them all into adulthood, acknowledging they are all one person but they are not a single story. They branch the story outward while also holding it all together, saying, "this is a story of someone who, despite the Jenga tower of these things, did not collapse… a story about picking the pieces back up."

These opening pages also clarify "this is a story that cannot be told without addiction." As this is a classy memoir from Seven Stories Press, the American home of Annie Ernaux and other trés fancy writers, readers may be surprised to then find pages encouraging them to perform spells and prepare themselves a ritual bath. Any memoir making moves towards self-help must tread lightly. I love an all-in, woo-woo journey (have you read Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic and are you forever changed?), but readers today are cautious. And readers who are in recovery are especially skeptical.

These successful exercises are possible because DiFrancesco proves themself to be an honest, open narrator. They openly question their faith, explaining that they are more comfortable relying on saints rather than a big God upstairs for guidance. They are also quite forthright in sharing their trauma and how complicated trauma becomes when it involves gender identity, relationships, and addiction. I've suffered trauma and had those who inflicted it use my alcoholism to justify their actions. This book not only made me feel seen, but it gave me an avenue to explore relief and healing.

That's the crux here. Breaking the Curse is a book about finding a way to heal. And DiFrancesco does, by hook or by crook. By page 211, when DiFrancesco tells us "the brain does heal," I truly believe that they are working spells, healing family traumas, and healing themself. I believe they are looking forward and not backwards. The road forward isn't sugar coated, but accepted as something that is inherently complex and unknowable.

All of the magic and ancestry and wonder is a through-line for the book, in terms of identity, because it's there right from the beginning. The complexity—a prism that DiFrancesco so beautifully renders in the opening pages—of the trans experience. Though DiFrancesco doesn't shy away from the trauma of their experience, this prism is gorgeous, and DiFrancesco is able to apply their knowledge broadly and generously. This is why Breaking the Curse is especially exciting, because DiFrancesco uses their book to heal not only themself but their family line. A big part of ancestor work/journeying/worship involves healing ancestral trauma—not just one's own, but the line. This book gives us a beautiful and heroic journey of a trans person in crisis delving into both their family's recent and ancient past to fix things. So even as transness is portrayed as some new thing in certain corners of society, DiFrancesco has gone and meaningfully placed themselves onto the altar of their family's past, which makes for a delightful historical reset that I found very satisfying.

The book is dedicated to St. Hildegard, whom DiFrancesco discusses near the end of their book. The way DiFrancesco summons St. Hildegard, a saint of vision, prophecy, and poetry, into Breaking the Curse and into their own life, recalls Thomas De Quincey's 1821 speculative essay "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" from his Suspiria de Profundis (which the inspiration for Dario Argento's witch films), as both essayists invoke mystical beings to explain the mysteries of our inner lives. Where DiFrancesco and De Quincey differ, however, is that De Quincey uses his fantastical figures to explain the depths of his sadness. DiFrancesco could easily do the same, but instead, they choose healing over sadness.

DiFrancesco doesn't claim literal visions, but instead serves up a powerful, metatextual explanation for how visions apply to both the writing of this book and their work in editing. By the end of this powerful memoir, it doesn't only feel like we've witnessed the breaking of a curse; we've also been given the tools to chip away at our own.