Maggie Walters: Fractured Motherhood
Maggie returns to the Blue Mountains to share the story around her latest memoir.
The Turning Page Bookshop are thrilled to announce we are the book sellers for Maggie Walters's return to the Blue Mountains!
Join Maggie as she shares the story behind her latest memoir:
Fractured Motherhood
Thursday 20 August 2026
7.00-8.30pm
Springwood Presbyterian Church
160 Macquarie Road Springwood
Entry is free but bookings are essential
About the Event
Maggie returns to the Blue Mountains to share the story around her latest memoir, Fractured Motherhood. This book is the follow-up to her internationally recognised and award-winning memoir SPLIT: A Life Shared – Living with Multiple Personality Disorder, which offered a rare first-person account of surviving severe childhood trauma and living with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
While SPLIT explores survival and dissociation, Fractured Motherhood turns to a deeply human question: what does it mean to become a mother when your own childhood was shaped by trauma?
This memoir follows Walters and her partner through the long and uncertain process of adopting three children from the Philippines. What begins as paperwork, waiting and hope soon becomes the everyday reality of family life — laughter, conflict, exhaustion, love, and the constant questioning familiar to many parents.
At its core, Fractured Motherhood speaks to something universal: the quiet fears many mothers carry about whether they are doing enough, doing it right, and giving their children the childhood they deserve.
For Walters, the legacy of her own upbringing undergirded those fears. Determined not to repeat the past, she explores her parents’ hidden histories, uncovering the traumas that shaped previous generations.
The book moves between past and present, asking how understanding where we come from might help us create something different for our children.
Melbourne psychiatrist Dr Matthew Roberts describes the memoir:
“Fractured Motherhood is Maggie Walters’ moving follow-up to SPLIT. It’s a quest to become the parent she never had—loving, present, safe. If her first book gave us the first-person view disrupted by the need to survive trauma, her second lets us step back for new perspectives on her story.”
While the memoir explores trauma and recovery, Walters says the book ultimately resonates far beyond those experiences.
“Every parent wonders if they’re getting it right,” she says. “Motherhood is full of doubt, love, fear and hope. This book is about that struggle, and about the possibility that we can give our children something better than what we received. My goal is to reduce stigma around complex mental health challenges and help communities engage in meaningful conversations that will nurture and change lives.”
Through honest storytelling, Fractured Motherhood explores adoption, attachment, intergenerational trauma, and the realities of raising children while carrying the legacy of a difficult past and mental health challenges.