About the Book
Lana Stasek doesn't write to please. She writes like she's peeling skin off old wounds - her own and everyone else's. This isn't a polite scrapbook of dates and places. It's a memory under a spotlight, family laid bare, the invisible debts no one ever asked for but everyone drags around. If you're here for comfort, wrong book. What you'll find is recognition - the kind that stings first, heals later.
Voices Within: Life Before and After doesn't play nice. Dreams aren't fairy escapes - they're x-rays, showing what the body already knows but the mind keeps locked up. Immigration isn't a victory parade. It's freedom with a price tag: exhaustion, humiliation, endless reinvention. Even sunlight through a borrowed window feels like rebellion when the rest of your life screams dependence.
And the dark? It's here, too. A cold mother. Soviet brutality. Silence that turned into armor - and into a weapon. Sometimes that silence blew outward, turning her into the kid who bullied others. Not many admit this. She does. Because cruelty never just disappears. It circles back, like a boomerang - maybe not to the same hand, but always close enough to cut.
Every insult here is a study in power. Every neglect, a test: is pain passed down, or does each generation manufacture its own fresh supply? Nothing is random. The abandoned dog, the watered-down milk, the petty betrayals - they're not accidents. They're the blueprint of a world where survival often means repeating the very violence you swore to end. Illness and loss aren't blind fate either. They're echoes. Consequences. The unpaid bill.
And yet this book isn't just a diagnosis. It's a fight. Between graves and bureaucrats, there's laughter - sharp, survival laughter. Not because it's funny, but because silence would kill faster. This is a book about refusing to vanish. About standing knee-deep in the ruins and still saying: here I am.
Voices Within isn't tragedy, though scars run through it. It isn't nostalgia, though it looks back. It's truth dragged into the open - a witnessing that won't let silence stay cheap, won't let wounds be forgotten, won't let a single voice, once found, ever go unheard.
About the Author :
Lana Stasek is a Ukrainian-born American writer. She came to the U.S. with two children and zero English, built a business, and in 2024 began writing. Her memoirs are not polite stories for polite shelves but raw, rule-breaking narratives that weave humor through pain and slice silence open with sarcasm. With family dementia as a haunting backdrop, she writes to preserve memory with honesty sharp enough to sting and irony that refuses to sit quietly. Her books - Voices Within: Family Chronicles and Life Before and After - confront trauma, immigration, and survival with wit, philosophy, and the pulse of generations. Vladyslava Borodavka immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of eight and graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2020. She is the English adaptation editor and translator of her mother Lana Stasek's memoirs. Her first published translation is Voices Within: Family Chronicles (2025). Vladyslava Borodavka immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of eight and graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2020. She is the English adaptation editor and translator of her mother Lana Stasek's memoirs. Her first published translation is Voices Within: Family Chronicles (2025).
Review :
"I'm not competing with coaches or therapists. I don't have diagrams or degrees. I write from the floor, from the inside, from the place where pain lives - where fear, anger, and loneliness breathe. From where real women live, not the polished ones on Instagram."
"The panic wasn't from drowning, but from realizing they wouldn't notice. It was a stranger who saved me, not my parents. Their response: 'Well, she didn't drown, did she?'"
"Why do we sometimes become the ones who hurt - not as a defense, but as the first strike? As a child, I bullied others deliberately, with a cold anger I can still remember. I wasn't born cruel. I was born wanting love and peace, but silence and constant judgment turned cruelty into the only language I thought I could speak. Silence in our house wasn't peace. It was a weapon.""I still carry shame - not mine, but my country's. Shame for a place that sent boys into fire and brought them back like broken furniture. Pain doesn't expire. Trauma doesn't have a shelf life. And I refuse to forget Viktor, because the second we forget men like him, every wound, every night terror, every shameful drink was for nothing."
"Immigration isn't a victory parade. It's waking up in a body that feels borrowed, stepping into a world that looks photoshopped, where silence is polished and no one explains the rules. Chicago, August 2006 - Ukraine to O'Hare, shuttle bags stuffed with pots and books, fear wrapped in plastic zippers. The heat hit like a fist, the city hummed like a concert, and for the first time, the world looked me in the eye and said: Your move."
"Before we go on - a warning. The next two chapters aren't in my voice. They're his. His story, his memories, his truth. We hadn't seen each other in ten years. And yet, when I walked into that restaurant, it felt like I'd only been gone for five minutes. His voice, calm, as if no time had passed. Memories don't fade - they just step outside for a smoke. And when they return, they bring with them what you thought was long buried."
"What would you feel if someone pulled you out of your country, your language, your very self - and dropped you into a place where nobody knows your name? My son was fifteen when his life flipped upside down - not by his choice. We moved for adult reasons, made adult decisions. He just came along because children don't get to choose. They inherit the consequences without ever touching the steering wheel. He ended up at Buffalo Grove High School, Illinois - a top ten school at the time - with no English, no familiar faces, and no ground under his feet. And he survived. Alone."
"That's the whole chapter right there: Don't surrender. Don't rot. Most people don't suddenly 'get old.' They just merge with their couch cushions and call it fate. I don't buy it. I don't do wellness blogs or glossy '10 Steps to a Better You.' This is my manual - how I wake up, how I move, how I don't let myself rot. Cold water, bitter coffee, a stretch, and sometimes a needle or two - not vanity, just hygiene. Not trying to look twenty-five, just refusing to look tired of everything. No surrender, not yet. Not while I'm still here."
"What would you do if someone gave you pain as a gift - trembling, alive, unhealed? I never expected to see that pain on Robert. He was always the one who said, 'Yes, darling.' Calm, agreeable, polite - until yeses turned into silence. Because when someone always says yes, at some point you stop feeling like there's anyone there at all. Polite nodding is not presence. It's sound without substance. And I don't want an echo. I want a person."
