Not Finished Yet, by Tracie Adams | Book Review

Not Finished Yet: Essays on the Rhythmic Beauty of a Life in Flux (Good Heritage Press, 2025) is one of those rare memoirs that manages to be simultaneously intimate, engaging and creatively written. It reads less like a straightforward autobiography and more like a long, deliberate experiment in form. The metaphor in question, a jellyfish, becomes the book’s organising principle and theme. Transparent yet luminous, delicate yet persistent, the creature embodies Adams’s recurring idea: that a life is never finished, only transforming.

The collection unfolds across four parts, The World in Flux, Floating Through Currents, Surrendering to the Undertow, and Drifting and Waiting. Each section corresponds to a different current in Adams’s life: childhood trauma, mental illness and addiction, grief, and eventual motherhood. The effect feels cyclical rather than linear. Like the tide, her prose pulls back, pauses, and returns stronger each time. “Beneath the surface of the ocean lies a quiet transformation,” she writes in A Jellyfish Origin Story. “I am a jellyfish. Welcome to my watery world of flux.”

In The World in Flux, Adams examines her life from childhood to adulthood, succeeding in making her experiences engaging for the average reader. Essays such as Pearls explore family dysfunction and childhood abuse without melodrama. “I’m a shell, my rough and smooth parts in his hands,” she writes of her father. Adams’s prose feels like a kind of literary engineering, every word considered and placed thoughtfully. She avoids excessive detail and instead relies on metaphor, allowing me to enjoy the essays intellectually while enjoying the gorgeous prose. Apparently, most of these essays have already been published in various journals, but you wouldn’t know, as they fit together really well.

The second section, Floating Through Currents, largely deals with mental illness and addiction. These essays are some of the strongest in the book. My Jellyfish Journey Through Mental Illness reads like a lab report. In An Apology to the Bank Teller I Robbed Accidentally, she recounts an episode where a bank teller accidentally misread a cheque and gave her more money than she was due with wry humour: “You probably thought you were dealing with a hardened criminal, a repeat offender with no conscience, a sociopath with no empathy for her victims.” That balance of self-awareness and absurdity gives her writing the kind of authenticity that I really personally appreciated.

The later sections shift from illness to faith and motherhood. Grief Is a Steep Hill to Climb and The God of Our Mamas reveal Adams’s evolution from survivor to seeker. “Maybe faith was never about believing without doubt,” she writes. “Maybe it was about choosing where to place my hope, even when it didn’t make sense.” Here, the book’s theological side emerges, but thankfully, it rarely feels preachy. Losing My Sparkle is a particularly heart-wrenching essay that almost made me tear up, telling the story of the loss of a cat. The Drift from Good to Bye is another one of the most affecting pieces, revisiting Adams’s first memory of loss and the feeling of helplessness.

What stands out about Not Finished Yet isn’t its subject matter—it’s the craft. Adams writes with an awareness of pacing and rhythm, and a distinctive style that most novelists envy. The essays build like chapters in a well-constructed novel, each one expanding on the previous. The jellyfish imagery could easily have felt overused, yet she keeps it alive by varying its emotional and symbolic role. The prose is clear, musical, and purposeful. By the final essay, Drifting and Waiting, Adams has achieved something admirable: a memoir that feels open-ended yet complete. “If there is one truth I hope to impart, it is that the act of living is fluid, unending in its potential,” she writes. “We are finished only when we stop moving forward, when we cease to explore the spaces in between.” It’s a fitting conclusion for a book called Not Finished Yet.

Final verdict: Not Finished Yet is a candid, well-crafted and oft beautiful book, blending memoir and poetic prose to explore mental illness, grief and memory. Full of lyrical writing and unforgettable aquatic imagery, Tracie Adams invites readers to view their lives differently.

You can get your copy of Not Finished Yet by Tracie Adams here!