Such a Pretty Picture: A Memoir

Reading Such a Pretty Picture is like being handed someone’s most vulnerable truth, raw and unfiltered. Andrea Leeb doesn’t just tell you about her life—she brings you into it with visceral clarity. From the opening scene, where a seemingly innocent bath becomes a pivot point in the author’s childhood, I knew this wasn’t going to be a typical memoir. It’s a story about survival—of trauma, betrayal, and, surprisingly, moments of love—rendered with a clarity that’s both poetic and emotionally searing.

Leeb’s prose is restrained, which makes the events she recounts even more powerful. The opening line—“It began the first time my father gave me a bath”—sets the stage for the heartbreaking reality of a little girl betrayed by those meant to protect her. It’s not just the abuse itself that hits hard, but the betrayal of silence, the gaslighting, and the way her mother’s love seems to disappear overnight. “What happened tonight is your fault,” her father tells her, a line that reverberates through the rest of the book like a curse.

What really struck me as a male reader was how invisibly and insidiously abuse and trauma can shape someone’s life, especially when it’s wrapped in silence and shame. Leeb doesn’t sensationalize any of it. Instead, she shows us the consequences—how a child learns to internalize guilt, how she adapts to survive, and how that survival sometimes looks like silence, compliance, or even self-harm. Her attempt to suffocate herself with cotton balls and tape in a shoebox scene was devastating. It’s written without melodrama, which makes it even more chilling.

There’s also a powerful undercurrent of identity throughout the book. Leeb often compares herself to her sister Sarai, who is consistently favored and protected. “Even without seeing, she twisted [Sarai’s curls] into tiny perfect ringlets,” she writes, describing her blind mother’s tactile affection. The juxtaposition is brutal—Sarai receives the warmth Andrea craves, while Andrea is met with distance, rejection, or worse.

Yet Such a Pretty Picture isn’t only about victimhood. It’s about clarity. Leeb’s adult reflections don’t excuse the past but seek to understand it. She grapples with how she once minimized the abuse (“At least he’d left me a virgin”), only to realize later that “rape is rape.” That kind of brutal honesty gives this memoir its depth.

This is not an easy book, but it’s an important one. For readers willing to sit with its pain, Such a Pretty Picture offers a profoundly moving look at how children survive the unthinkable—and how memory, voice, and truth can begin the path to healing. It’s a book I won’t forget anytime soon.