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Anita Fiore Welsh was given up for adoption in 1963, through an adoption that wasn’t legal. Her memoir, Waiting For the Bad Thing to Happen, published July 21, 2026, covers the years that followed, including time in foster care, relationships, marriages, all looked back on with a fair amount of hard-earned wisdom. At 202 pages, it’s not a particularly long book, but it covers a lot of years and a lot of people, and by the end you will feel like you’ve lived through it alongside her.
The memoir opens with that early abandonment, and it becomes the lens through which Welsh understand much of what comes after, every relationship measured, consciously or not, against the possibility that it could disappear the way her first family did. From there she moves through the foster care system, into a first serious relationship with a young man named Brian, and through the setbacks and small victories that make up the rest of her adult life. Along the way she takes us through weddings, about surviving pandemic isolation with her husband in the same house but separate rooms, and about learning to revisit painful memories without flinching from them.
The book’s biggest strength is Welsh’s ability to pull the reader into her interior life. Memoir is a tricky form. Unlike fiction, an author obviously can’t invent a more dramatic turn when real life gets slow, so unless the author is a celebrity with an inherently newsworthy story, the writing lives or dies on whether ordinary experience feels worth reading. Welsh pulls it off. Her account of foster care doesn’t lean on shock value or Tracy Beaker-esque drama; it’s grounded in small details that make that chaotic period feel enjoyable to read and relatable. The author is also a likeable narrator who doesn’t lean into self-pity, even when the material would fully justify it.
The author’s prose style is another asset: simple, direct, and easy to read. She doesn’t over-explain her emotions or reach for ornate language, and that plainness suits the confessional tone she’s going for. It feels like she’s talking to you rather than performing for you. The book is unmistakably Christian, but it isn’t preachy. A reader without any religious background can still follow her reasoning. The book leans hopeful throughout without ever going saccharine, which is a hard balance to strike.
Readers looking for a tightly plotted narrative arc may also find themselves waiting for momentum that doesn’t always arrive, as this is a life told roughly in order, not a story engineered around a climax. The structure can feel loose, jumping between time periods relatively quickly and occasionally doubling back to fill in context the reader didn’t know they were missing. However, these aren’t really criticisms so much as observations of the format.
It’s enjoyable to read Welsh trace the string of relationships that came before her current marriage, and she’s honest about why each one fell apart rather than just cataloguing them. By the time she reaches her current husband, the contrast is obvious without her having to point it out. The author’s relationship with daughter Jessie and her wedding is a fun, warm detour too, full of dress shopping and borrowed jewelry, and it’s nice to see Welsh’s children get moments of pure happiness that aren’t weighed down by all the history that came before.
Personally, I really appreciated how Welsh tackled attachment and trust in this book. The title “Waiting for the Bad Thing to Happen” works because it names something a lot of readers will recognise, whether or not their own history involves adoption or foster care: that feeling of never fully relaxing around the people close to you for fear they will abandon you. I imagine how the book approaches this topic will be relatable for many people.
The first stage of human development after birth is to take in the outside world. To handle all these new sensations and feelings, the first goal is to develop trust. Without trust, without a sense of safety and security, the world is overwhelming and frightening. Trust is the foundation that allows us to go forward into the world, to have new experiences and relationships.
There’s a moment where Welsh reflects on the Little Prince’s fox, who reminds her that the essential is invisible to the eye, and that idea threads through the whole book. She keeps returning to things that can’t be measured as the real subject of her story, more than any single event. She also nods to Einstein’s line about living as though nothing is a miracle or everything is, and that captures the book’s outlook well: after everything, Welsh comes down on the side of miracles, even while admitting she still doesn’t have all the answers.
All in all, Waiting For the Bad Thing to Happen is an effective and subtly touching little memoir, carried by the author’s voice and beautiful, understated writing. It doesn’t reinvent the genre, and it has the pacing you’d expect from a true story rather than a constructed plot. With that said, Welsh’s plainspoken honesty and hard-won reflections make it an easy recommendation.
Final verdict: For fans of Tara Westover’s Educated, Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, or the reflective essays of Anne Lamott, Waiting For the Bad Thing to Happen is well worth adding to the shelf. It won’t be the most gripping memoir you read this year, but it may be one of the most honest and inspiring!
You can get your copy of Waiting for the Bad Thing to Happen here!
