A Girl in an Empty House: a heart-wrenching page-turner about family, trauma, and healing, based on a true story

by Rebecca Cohen

“They’re gone,” I hear someone say. “Your mother, they all left. Did you know?” The door opens without resistance. They didn’t even bother to lock; they never did. Doors are never locked here, not in this apartment nor any other. Who would steal anything here? There is nothing to take.

Born in a rural desert town to a family of Persian immigrants, Miriam was twelve years old the first time she had three meals in one day.

The tenth daughter of twelve siblings, she was raised so far away from anyone who might care that there was no one around to see her endure the debilitating malnourishment that first brought her close to death before she was school age. Or the violent outbursts of her physically and verbally abusive father. Or the unrelenting, wall-to-wall poverty that fueled their desperate lives.

But it all came to a startling, unimaginable point when Miriam returned home from summer camp, only to find the front door ajar. Entering the bedroom she shared with nine other children, she discovers the furniture is all gone. No food. No note. Just a girl in an empty house.

Impoverished and isolated, Miriam realizes that all she had endured up to this moment was just the beginning. If she wants to survive, she will have to choose between following her family—or following her heart. As she begins to work toward a better future, she also embarks on a journey that will help her reclaim her self-worth and identity—as a mother, as a partner, and as a woman.

Powerful, compelling, and tear-invokingly emotional, A Girl in an Empty House tells a one-of-a-kind story of perseverance and grit. Like Tara Westover and Amy Griffin before her, Miriam’s journey towards womanhood is as unforgettable as it is iconic.

128 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 16, 2025

Reviews

[Vickie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir is filled with dark despair and only presents hope for the future at almost the end of the book. The child Miri was never wanted and thus grew up thinking she had no worth to anyone. When she was assaulted multiple times by multiple people, she cried bitterly but had no counselor or friends to whom to talk about it. When she went to camp and returned to find that he family had moved and left her behind, my heart broke for her. This was a difficult book to read but a story that needed to be told, not only as a catharsis for the author but so that others like me can be grateful for all we have and what we did not have to suffer.
I purchased a copy of this book and was not required to write a positive review. All opinions expressed are my own.

[Mitchell Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very moving and highlights the strength of its main character, Miriam, who we first meet after she returns from a summer camp to find her entire family--mother, father, and twelve siblings--have deserted her, leaving her at the age of seventeen to fend for herself in an empty house, devoid of furniture and appliances except for a lonely refrigerator. She has been, since then, we find, subjected to a horrendous, monstrous abusive father who regularly gives beatings to his wife and children, sexual abuse from three of her brothers, a neglectful mother cowed by her husband who is the dominant master of all in the house and who, when Miriam was born told his wife not to bring Miriam home because she was not a boy. It is a horrendous upbringing she endures in a strict Persian Jewish family culture that believes women are to be submissive and serve the men in the family.

And even when she escapes her dysfunctional family to get a job and live on her own, she endures further beatings from her brother, two rapes, but somehow, in the end excels in her job, rising to a managerial position, and marries, has children, giving them all she never had as a child. But, still, with this, she still carries around all the hurts and insecurities of a regretful childhood.

In the end, this story is a testament to a woman's strength in overcoming all the abuses and neglect of a paternal upbringing full of hurt and insecurity to rise to the top.

[Demi Neill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sad but a happy ending.