“If you find yourself reliving unpleasant moments with the clarity you wish you could reserve for joy, that’s trauma,” writes Kristen Millares Young in “Desire Lines” (out Oct. 6 from Red Hen Press), her first memoir.

The book traces her path from growing up in a privileged and abusive Florida household run by Cuban exiles to making a home and a writing life in Seattle for the past 22 years, starting as a staff reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Since her P-I days, Millares has penned an award-winning novel, “Subduction,” co-founded a nonprofit newsroom, taught writing locally and nationally, and served as an erudite moderator for countless high-profile literary events.

If a desire line is a path that emerges “eroded yet unforeseen, next to the routes that were planned for us,” as Millares Young writes, this book does not walk that route alone. Millares Young infuses her search for self-actualization with quotes from a wide range of feminist thinkers, from Adrienne Rich to Audre Lorde to Kate Zambreno. Whether interviewing sex workers in Cuba or researching a pagan mother goddess cult while investigating her own family history in Spain, Millares Young searches for kinship among those who reject the strictures of traditional womanhood. In this sense, her quest for freedom emerges as part of a lineage of resistance: “On the far side of silence, I suspect, is joy,” she writes.

The Seattle Times spoke to Millares Young over email in advance of her book launch for “Desire Lines” at Elliott Bay Book Company on Oct. 9. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is a memoir formed by essays — while the essays function independently of one another, you revisit themes and even specific references that telegraph back to the beginning, so it becomes a cycle of essays where the impact deepens as you move on. I wonder if you could speak to the role repetition and reflection play here.

The essays stand alone — each holds its own evidence — but they return to the same ground: my abuela’s kitchen, a pagan temple in Galicia, a collective of feminist thinkers. A theme comes back when the return produces more knowledge than the first crossing.

That is my method. Repetition is also how I was trained. An investigative reporter returns to the record until it gives. You read a file the 10th time and what you thought you knew shifts under your eyes. This book is the reflection of rereading — you go back over what you wrote, and you realize what you could not afford to see at first. To harvest those insights, I had to season my own thinking.

How does Cybele, the mother goddess, fit into this narrative?

There is an ancient sanctuary in Galicia called Santa Eulalia de Bóveda. Its guide told me that Roman worshippers baptized themselves in bulls’ blood right there where I stood. I wrote it down the way reporters do. Later, a university archaeologist told me there is no evidence a bull ever bled out in that room. The book was conceived between the stories I was handed and the journey I took to find the truth.

My family’s line runs from Cuba back to Spain. Behind the mother I was raised to venerate stood an older goddess — Cybele, mother of the gods, with her lions and her drum, worshipped around the Mediterranean long before the Virgin Mary was minted. When I was a girl, I watched my Cuban grandparents pray the rosary several times per day. Cybele’s story is buried beneath the guilty incantations I grew up hearing. I followed her into temples and archives because I wanted to know how the centuries changed who a great mother was thought to be. Why was her image recast by society?

And what role does motherhood itself play for you in this book?

Motherhood in this book is a position more than a subject — I write as the mothered and as the mother at once. Adrienne Rich wrote about mothering as the one channel of power left to women allowed no other. I watched what that channel did to the women who raised me. Then I stood in it myself, with sons, in a country busy narrowing women’s channels again.

One of the book’s epigraphs asks, with Audre Lorde, “To whom do I owe the woman I have become?” Motherhood is where I went for that answer. It is also where the answer refused to stay, because a mother is not the whole of any woman — not of the women who raised me, not of me. If you have ever been asked to be only one thing, you know the cost.

“Great Mother” was the book’s working title before it became the first essay. That order still feels right. The mothers come first. Then you spend the rest of your life finding out what else they were.

How did you decide what to tell, and how to tell it?

Slowly, and against my training. A reporter is taught to keep herself out of the story. I kept myself out of mine for years. Some of these essays circled a decade before they landed. I fact-checked my own family the way I would check any powerful institution, because that is what a family is.

A tacit agreement to silence is no longer my organizing principle. A family can guard its idea of itself more fiercely than it guards its children. Ours did. The disclosure in these essays moves the way disclosure moved in my life — it arrives, retreats, returns carrying more than it could hold the first time. That is how a child tells, when the household is arranged against the telling. She says it once, sideways. She reads the room. Maybe tries again later.

You write, “Sure, I published hundreds of articles with my byline. But I rarely disclosed my own truths.” What does this feel like now?

Rueful is the honest word. A byline names the reporter as the author but not the subject of a story. For 20 years I put other people’s truths on the record and kept mine off it. My byline looked like presence. It worked like cover. I don’t disown that reporter. She built the discipline this book runs on — check it, source it, say the hard thing. What it feels like now is alignment. The reporter and the source are the same person.