Amanda Montoni describes herself as the kind of person strangers tell their life story to in a grocery queue. At 32, married, newly sober, raising two children, and several months into her decision to go no contact with her mother, she has more than earned that description.

Raised between South Carolina and El Paso by a young single mother, Amanda learned early to adapt herself to whatever environment she was in. Outwardly confident, top of her class, socially fluent; inwardly fighting an eating disorder and self-harm she kept hidden from everyone around her for five years. Her sense of identity was fragile, her sexuality was uncertain, and at 14 she was sent without warning from South Carolina to El Paso with no phone, no explanation, and no one who knew where she had gone.

In this conversation with Andrew, Amanda traces the events t ...