Never Stop Walking

Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World, a memoir by Christina Rickardsson, tells the story of her life as a Brazilian-born, Swedish woman who writes about her experiences living in poverty with a mentally ill mother on the streets of Sao Paolo. Later, she was adopted and struggled to fit into a more comfortable life in Europe with doting adoptive parents. The memoir is about her struggle to find comfort in adult life after childhood trauma and the lasting impact of a difficult childhood on her perceptions of the world as an adult.

Christina Rickardsson was born Christiana Mara Coelho in Sao Paolo, Brazil. For the first seven years of her childhood, she and her brother were raised by their single mother, who lived in poverty and struggled to care for them. Christiana and Patrick lived in forest caves for many years with their mother, who was schizophrenic and unable to provide a stable home for them, nor make a living. During the days, the children foraged and begged for money and food on the streets of Sao Paolo. Their biggest concern was finding enough money or food so they wouldn't starve.

Eventually, their mother, Petronilia took the children from the forest caves to live permanently on the streets of Sao Paolo in the favelas. Petronilia worked jobs as a laborer, doing whatever she could to survive and feed her children. Christiana recalls watching her mother work, recognizing her love and her desire to live. Christiana shares anecdotes of life with the other street kids, many of whom she thinks of fondly to this day. In other moments, she recalls the violence of life on the street, as when she realized she had accidentally killed a little boy who was trying to steal food from her.



After seven years together, Christiana and Patrick discovered that their mother had put them up for adoption. She left them at an orphanage that eventually placed them both in a middle-class family in Sweden. Through the adoption process, Christiana became Christina Rickardsson. Though in some ways relieved to have a roof over their heads, Patrick and Christina found life in Sweden confusing and overwhelming. Now in a safe environment, Christina felt she was still her old self – a scrappy, sometimes violent girl who would do anything to live. This contrasted dramatically with other children she knew and with the realities of her new life in Europe.

Eventually, in adulthood, Christina's life began to disintegrate. She couldn’t find a place for herself, causing emotional and physiological damage. Realizing that her childhood trauma was not going to disappear, even in the comfort of her Swedish adolescence and adulthood, Christina decided to track down the orphanage that had arranged her adoption, in the hope of better understanding herself by interrogating her roots. Eventually, Christina flew to Brazil to meet with her mother, hoping to merge her two identities – the scrappy street-fighter Christiana and coiffed, brown-skinned, middle-class Christina who dreams of fitting in.

Through finding her mother and rediscovering her roots, Christina came to understand not only herself, but also what family means, the struggle of living transnationally, and the cyclical nature of poverty and trauma. She was also able to come to terms with the grief for the mother she lost and to find solace and courage in her struggle to survive.



Christina Rickardsson is a writer and entrepreneur living in Sweden. She was born in Brazil, where she was raised by a mentally ill mother until age seven. Her memoir follows the story of her childhood trauma and her new life, and the ways she reconciled her past with her present and future. She now works in the north of Sweden as a businesswoman and seeks to promote tolerance and dialogue among those who live in her home country.