Bootleg Heart

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Book Synopsis: Bootleg Heart: A Memoir of Trauma, Truth, and Radical Healing

By Eva Robinson Schley, LMSW

Bootleg Heart is a raw, unflinching memoir that traces the journey of a Black woman who learned to survive by performing strength—and who ultimately chose to heal by reclaiming her truth.

Told with the piercing clarity of a therapist and the bleeding honesty of a survivor, Eva Robinson Schley invites readers into a world where love was modeled as transactional, silence was a survival tool, and girlhood was stolen by generational trauma and betrayal. From the Garden Valley Projects of Cleveland to the corridors of academia and the therapy room, Eva excavates the layers of her story—abuse, abandonment, motherhood, ambition, burnout, spiritual awakening—and lays them bare on the page.

Each chapter weaves personal narrative with clinical insight, offering not just testimony, but a roadmap. Bootleg Heart is about more than survival; it’s about disruption, reclamation, and the audacity to heal out loud.

This is a story for every woman who was told to be strong instead of whole. For every mother who has mothered through pain. For every survivor who still feels broken. This is what it looks like when a bootleg heart keeps beating anyway.