House of Good Intentions Short Book Summary

Having graduated from Brown University and held a series of professional jobs at Harvard and MIT, Priscilla’s comfortable and relatively stable life threatens to unravel when, at 31, she decides to create a new family for herself after a remarkable recovery from a life-threatening stroke and the accidental death of her mother. A sudden engagement to a Brazilian boyfriend, their eagerness to conceive a child, and her hasty choice to marry the baby’s father, lead to unexpected consequences.

Although she had never felt happier or healthier than while pregnant, Priscilla’s problems multiply when postpartum psychosis and depression set in after the birth of her daughter. Priscilla’s already-fragile mental health continues to deteriorate. Unnerved, her husband turns against her. 

Lost without her mother, Priscilla faces a series of psychiatric hospitalizations. Confronting near-homelessness, job loss, divorce, and social services threatening to take her baby, she relies on her aging father. 

Will Priscilla prove plucky enough to find the stability she needs to turn her life around while grieving her missing mother? Or will she be forced to leave her daughter the way her own birth mother abandoned her? Can Priscilla stop the cycle of trauma and become the kind of mother her daughter needs?