Daria Burke once believed survival was the story—until healing taught her to stay with it. In her memoir Of My Own Making, she excavates the jagged truths of her upbringing—not to romanticize her resilience, but to dissect it. Born in Detroit to a father who vanished and a mother caught in addiction’s grip, Burke clawed her way to the top of fashion’s C-suite. But success, as she tells it, wasn’t healing. It was camouflage.
“I believed survival was the story,” Burke said. “But healing asks us to sit still and stay with the story.”
That deeper story—part memoir, part methodology—follows a woman no longer interested in simply surviving. When a photo of a car accident shook loose memories she had long buried, Burke didn’t just revisit her trauma. She studied it. The memoir pulls readers into her four-year dive into neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and post-traumatic growth, blending hard science with hard-won soul work.
Burke makes the case that healing isn’t woo—it’s biological. “Neuroplasticity tells us we are not fixed,” she said. “What we learn, we can unlearn.” For Black women especially, her message lands like a balm. “If epigenetics tells us trauma can be passed down, so can resilience.”
Her concept of “reparenting” the inner child isn’t some Instagram platitude. It’s a call to reckon with the parts of ourselves that didn’t get what they needed. And Burke knows what that kind of reckoning costs. She admits that ambition, once her lifeline, eventually became her armor. “Achievement became my way of hiding,” she said. “The question that unraveled me was: Who am I without the title, the salary, the applause?”
The answer is still unfolding, but Of My Own Making offers a glimpse. It’s not a prescription, Burke insists. It’s an invitation. To feel what you’ve buried. To choose again. To write a new ending—not despite the past, but with it.
In the end, Burke doesn’t sell redemption. She shows us the work. And that, perhaps, is the most radical offering of all.
Of My Own Making is available now in hardcover ($30), ebook ($14.99), and audiobook ($24.99) formats at major retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.
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