Stories of a Life is shaped by the narrator’s conflicting and knot-tight relationships with her mother. Meschaninova worries about her mother’s bad heart so is afraid to upset her; she is afraid of not being like her mother and is tortured by the fear of not being her real biological daughter... Natasha is facing the unnerving and harrowing truth about her mother’s awareness of what Natasha’s stepfather did to her, stalking the nine-year-old girl, whom he molested and raped at the age of twelve. At the book’s end, in a story entitled Mom, Nataliya directly addresses her mother in a heartbreaking ode that accepts and embraces her mother’s real self.

Extremely frank and private, Stories of a Life is also a book of unvarnished portrayals of provincial life in Russia during the early 1990s. Meshchaninova documents a reality where a teenager must navigate a community with diffused borders and a sense of freedom reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, plagued by mundane crime, addiction, and violence. Her text serves as a coping mechanism that the narrator herself calls “literary exhibitionism”. The book grows into the struggle of a girl coming of age in an aggressively non-congenial society.

Meshchaninova does not offer commentary on her feelings and emotions, and she doesn’t overstate the harsh experiences she had to cope with. In a laconic, raw, and minimalistic manner, she states her story and calls her readers as witnesses. Refusing to be a victim — though her experience as a 12-year-old teenager who was sexually abused by her stepfather is nothing less than being the victim of a crime — or a part of these brutal realities, Nataliya seeks power in the word, molding a different world in her texts, avenging her foes in diaries and notes, and watching her often graphic hatred-infused images come to life. Quite eerily the author states in the text, “whatever you write will come true”.