Ugandan music icon Irene Namubiru, this week, dropped as promised her deeply personal memoir, an exposé of the long-documented breakdown of her relationship with her mother, Justine Nyanzi Namawejje, and extended family.

The book titled “My Mother Knows: My Journey to Healing” was launched at the Kampala Serena Hotel.

It details a profoundly strained and estranged relationship with her mother, a silence that has stretched for over a decade.

She reveals in the book how the estrangement was worsened by a harrowing incident in 2013 in Japan, where she was framed for a drug offence.

Rather than finding solace in her family, she was met with indifference and hostility from her mother and siblings, a betrayal that ultimately led to the severe breakdown of their relationship.

“Writing this book feels like a very heavy load taken off my shoulders,” she said.

“I had not held onto this information in a bid to protect my mother, per se, because most of the things I went through, she knew, but she was shielding all these people who hurt me anyway.”

“I was trapped in the thoughts of, if I complain, I will look bad, and if I tell the truth, people would not believe me.”

The final catalyst for Namubibu’s decision to publish her story came when she overheard a phone conversation.

“The point I felt I was done protecting her was when I heard her speaking on the phone about things I could not believe,” she recounted.

Her mother was telling a stranger that Namubiru hated her grandmother and was not helping them, which the singer says was untrue.

More chillingly, her mother accused her of exhuming her grandparents’ remains to use them for witchcraft.

This scared me because at this point they even called the police, and they roughed me up,” she recalled.