Amy Gabrielle is a writer, digital creator, and advocate for authentic self-expression in midlife women. Following her husband’s death from cancer, she began using memoir and social media to explore the complex intersection of grief and desire, cultivating a community of thousands drawn to honest conversations about life after loss. Her work appears in Absolute Pleasure on Substack, as well as Medium publications including The Memoirist and Slackjaw. She lives in New York City, where she enjoys photography, travel, and raising her son.

Blending the sensual candor of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild with the emotional honesty of Nora McInerny’s It’s Okay to Laugh, this bold memoir is a tale of love, grief, midlife reinvention, and the unapologetic reclaiming of desire after devastating loss.

When Amy Gabrielle’s husband died from cancer, her carefully constructed life crumbled. After three years of caregiving, the fifty-four-year-old widow found herself raising her neurodivergent son alone—and experiencing an unexpected sensual reawakening that both challenged and invigorated her.

Widow in the City chronicles Amy’s raw, unfiltered journey through grief and desire following her husband’s death. From exploring dating apps and casual encounters to rediscovering her sensuality through lingerie and creative self-expression, she challenges cultural taboos about midlife female desire while fighting to rebuild her identity. As she grapples with the duality of loss—mourning her husband while embracing her newfound freedom—she discovers that grief and pleasure can coexist in surprising ways.

Candid, provocative, and ultimately empowering, this memoir illuminates the messy reality of reclaiming joy after devastating loss. Amy’s transformation from a grieving widow to a woman fully embracing her authentic self offers a roadmap for anyone seeking to reinvent their life when the future they planned suddenly vanishes. Her story reminds us that even in our darkest moments, the path to healing may lead to unexpected places—and that it’s never too late to rediscover who we truly are.

Julie Savitch, EdD, is a passionate child advocate with a decade of experience as Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), as well as an Educational Decision Maker (EDM). She taught elementary school in New York City and was a literacy professor at West Chester University. When she isn’t writing, Julie spends her time volunteering, hiking, cooking and getting muddy in a ceramics studio. Julie currently lives in Radnor, Pennsylvania, but prefers to spend her time in the mountains.

In this intimate memoir, a child advocate chronicles her seven-year journey fighting for four siblings in America’s child welfare system, offering vital insights for professionals, advocates, and anyone passionate about transforming children’s lives.

From suburban empty-nester to Court Appointed Special Advocate, this powerful memoir chronicles a seven-year journey alongside four siblings trapped in America’s complex child welfare system. Through unflinching observations and raw honesty, author Julie Savitch brings readers into the lives of Kenny, CJ, Zoe, and Allegra as they navigate the turbulent waters of family preservation, foster care, and the elusive search for a forever home.

The journey begins with an optimistic mission to keep a family intact, working with Dawn, a mother battling addiction and instability. When the children enter foster care, separated and scared, Julie becomes their unwavering champion—fighting to maintain their precious sibling bonds across multiple placements, advocating for their educational needs, and serving as a crucial bridge between an often-fragmented system of schools, foster homes, and courtrooms.

As Julie evolves from an idealistic volunteer to a battle-tested advocate, she confronts impossible choices and the profound responsibility of being the only consistent adult in four young lives. Grounded in research about foster care, sibling separation, and parental incarceration, this intimate account reveals the hidden realities of America’s child welfare system while demonstrating the transformative power of showing up for vulnerable children.

Joanne Redding grew up in Brooklyn and eventually made her way to Manhattan, then the suburbs of Westchester County, and finally Greenwich, CT. She holds a bachelor’s degree in French and a master’s in finance from NYU and is a certified Master Gardener with a degree in landscape design; over the years, she’s worked at an airport and an engineering firm, spent over fifteen years on Wall Street, and run her own landscape design business. The proud mom of two amazing young adults, Joanne shares her home in the New York City area with her two elderly but endlessly loved dogs.

Perfect for fans of The Glass Castle and Educated, this raw, powerful memoir recounts one woman’s journey—from gritty 1970s Brooklyn to testosterone-fueled 1980s–1990s Wall Street and beyond—to reclaim truth, identity, and self-worth after trauma.

A powerful memoir of trauma, resilience, and female empowerment, House of Pretend tells the story of a girl who, raised in the shadow of her father’s death by an emotionally abusive, narcissistic mother, learns early to perform, to please, and to pretend—and spends the rest of her life struggling to unlearn those behaviors.

Determined to escape the silence and neglect of her childhood, Joanne claws her way into the male-dominated world of Wall Street as a young woman—only to find that success means nothing without self-worth. When her boss offers her a million dollars to have his child, she is forced to reckon with everything she’s buried: the deep ache of abandonment, years of chasing love in all the wrong places, and the belief that she’s undeserving of more. What follows is not a transformation into someone new but rather a fierce unmasking—a reclamation of the voice, worth, and identity she has had within her all along.

Offering a gripping blend of raw emotion and biting clarity, House of Pretend is about what happens when a woman stops waiting to be saved and instead saves herself—with grit, honesty, and just the right amount of badassery.

Jill D. Swenson grew up in the Twin Cities and moved to Wisconsin in high school. She graduated from Lawrence University and earned an MA and PhD from The University of Chicago before going on to teach journalism and media studies at the University of Georgia-Athens and earn tenure at Ithaca College. For a decade she lived off the grid on a small-scale sustainable farm in upstate New York; now she lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she works as an editor and literary consultant, belongs to a curling club and a poetry group, and enjoys walking her dog.

For fans of the series Finding Your Roots, a compelling memoir about how land connects us all—and how, if we are to mend our relations to each other and the earth, we must first reckon with our past, no matter how distant, shameful, or tragic.

When Jill Swenson returns to her mother’s hometown after her funeral, she finds a new Seven Clans Casino under construction in Warroad, Minnesota, on Lake of the Woods. There, she learns, Red Lake Nation has recently dispossessed descendants of Ojibway spiritual leader Kakaygeesick from their land—land where the family has lived for the last two centuries—and has also denied them tribal membership.

In searching for answers, Jill meets the great-grandson of Kakaygeesick. Over weeks, months, and years, a friendship forms between them, and Jill gradually discovers what allotments, blood quantum, and the history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs have to do with her, the great-granddaughter of immigrants who homesteaded on reservation land. Estranged from her father, still mourning the suicide of her husband and the loss of their farm in upstate New York, and now grieving her mother’s death, Jill has spent decades trying to put the past behind her—but discovers the only path forward is to reckon with history.

Clear-eyed and yet deeply personal, The Land of Everlasting Sky is a compelling exploration of the history we inherit and our relationships to land and each other.

Margaret Whitford served in leadership positions within the nonprofit world for twenty years, including ten years in the social justice field, before turning to writing. She is fascinated by the ways in which we all seek to create places of refuge for ourselves, both in a metaphorical and a physical sense. The History We Carry is her first memoir. An avid Francophile, Margaret, with her husband, divides her time between a small village in the South of France and her home in Concord, Massachusetts.

For fans of Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, a memoir for daughters who recognize that to truly understand themselves and the patterns of their lives, they must first understand their mothers and the forces that shaped these women.

When Margaret Whitford’s mother was dying, she told those present that her daughter “had her history.” This was true; Margaret had conducted interviews with her mother during the last decade of her life. But this didn’t end their estrangement, and Margaret chose not to return to her mother’s side during her final days.

In this memoir, Margaret confronts this decision by unearthing in her mother’s traumatic history the roots of the emotional distance between them. She explores how a history marked by the devastation of World War II in Europe, a violent childhood home, and sexual assault accumulated into complex PTSD that shaped her mother and the way she parented Margaret as her firstborn and as a daughter—and, in turn, how Margaret carried her mother’s trauma forward in her sense of self, in her relationships to others, and in the ways she navigated her world. Indeed, Margaret not only had her mother’s history—she embodied it.

Ultimately, The History We Carry confronts the legacy of intergenerational trauma with wisdom and compassion, revealing how familial history shapes each of us but need not be wholly determinative of whom we become and how we choose to live.

Jill Vanneman is a former prosecutor and police legal adviser, as well as a legal consultant for a major city’s planning and development department. She holds a BA in American studies from Whitman College, a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University, and a JD from the University of Puget Sound. Her short fiction has been featured in True Stories and Oaxaca: A Wayfaring Writers’ Anthology; her nonfiction work has appeared in the Citizen Patriot, Miles City Tribune, and elsewhere. She resides in the Seattle area with her aging tuxedo cat, Pablo, and her rescue dog, Honey.

For readers of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, a debut memoir about a woman born into a conservative family who spends decades grappling with self-acceptance and her parents’ conditional love—until she finally learns how to love herself.

Born with a cleft lip into an upper-middle-class, conservative family obsessed with image and success, Jill Vanneman was subjected early to a “perfection campaign” aimed at erasing flaws.

Told with unflinching honesty, moments of wit, and emotional depth, this coming-of-age story unfolds against the backdrop of 1980s America—a time and place where being a lesbian could cost you your job, your family, and your sense of self. As she grows into adolescence, college, and early adulthood, Jill begins to question not only her place in her family but also her sexual identity. Her journey leads her through turbulent relationships, professional achievements shadowed by internalized shame, and a heartbreaking attempt to reconcile with disapproving parents. Gradually, through therapy, spiritual exploration, and painful introspection, Jill learns that healing doesn’t come from perfection but from embracing the flawed, fierce truth of who she is.

A raw, deeply personal memoir of family expectations, social shame, and a relentless drive for perfection, The Perfection Campaign is a compelling testament to resilience, identity, and the high cost—and ultimate liberation—of living authentically.

Sheila Kimble-Haas, a nurse practitioner and midwife trained at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent her career caring for marginalized communities—from Native American reservations to Arctic villages to African nations through humanitarian work. After more than ten years in France, she returned to New Mexico, where the desert’s stark beauty, a community of friends, and enough solitude inspired her to put her stories on the page. But her restless spirit is calling her back to France, carrying the desert’s lessons and a renewed hunger for the journey ahead.

After heartbreak in Pennsylvania, a forty-five-year-old widow journeys to Sudan’s war zone, where a chaotic maternity ward teaches her a new kind of strength—and becomes her path to healing.

When Sheila’s husband died, grief didn’t just visit—it swallowed her whole. She didn’t want casseroles or kind words. She wanted out.

Broken and carrying a battered rucksack, she joined a humanitarian mission in war-torn South Sudan, where gunfire drove her under delivery-room tables and days blurred as she triaged mothers and children ravaged by tropical disease. But even the pulse of the frantic mission could not strip away her sorrow until she heard the ululation of the Sudanese women: a fierce, haunting cry, to celebrate life, to exorcise sorrow, and to rip the past from the body to make space for the now.

Waiting for the Kick: A Midwife’s Grief and Rebirth in Africa recounts Sheila Kimble Haas’s journey from a home thick with loss in America to the edge of the world, where she delivers babies in mud-walled clinics, navigates tribal customs and civil unrest, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with women whose strength redefined survival.

This powerful memoir of loss, reckoning, and unexpected transformation is both a tribute to the unbreakable spirit of women and the story of a midwife who discovered that healing begins not in comfort, but in surrender.

Ruth Zelig migrated three times and lived in four countries before the age of twenty, changing languages (at least five), cultures, and school systems in each place. She got a master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Rochester, NY, and a bachelor’s in Linguistics and French at Lehman College, CUNY. She was a systems engineer at IBM for years, consulting with clients as programmer and analyst; today, she is a writer, photographer, and gardener who lives in Manhattan with her husband of forty-three years.

For fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, an epistolary memoir about two young women’s friendship across continents and decades—an enduring connection kept alive by the simple act of written correspondence.

When Ruth’s family migrates from Brazil to North America in 1964, she and her best friend, Elana, are forced to separate. They decide to keep in touch via written correspondence—an exchange that ultimately persists for twenty years. From São Paulo, Elana writes candidly with warmth, dedication, and support, easing Ruth’s assimilation to first Canada, then the United States. Lonely and uprooted, Ruth derives solace from the friendship and the correspondence. As both girls mature and embark on a life in different countries and cultures, their bonds transcend their differences. They remain friends for life.

Fifty years after parting, Ruth and Elana re-read aloud the letters that they exchanged as young women. The experience of hearing their words written in letters and sent like a bridge across the continent and half a lifetime is a revelation that stuns the friends: the antecedent voice spoken in the concrete voice of the present.

Shannon Nering is a former CBC television host and reality TV producer turned natural medicine practitioner and storyteller. Her work bridges the worlds of media, motherhood, and modern mysticism, drawing from a rich background that includes advanced studies in consciousness and ongoing PhD research in natural medicine. She is the founder of Glo Well, a wellness brand and app whose mission is to support women through midlife transformation, and she leads seasonal detoxes and retreats through her practice Glo Kauai. Shannon lives on the North Shore of Kauai.

For fans of Eat Pray Love and Untamed, a soulful memoir of motherhood, mysticism, and plant medicine that chronicles one woman’s journey of healing and transformation in the lush wilds of Kauai.

What if your greatest teachers weren’t shamans in the jungle but the people you eat breakfast with every morning?

The Mother Vine is a raw, often funny, and deeply human story of one woman’s awakening through plant medicine—and the winding road that leads her there. After walking away from a high-powered TV career and a picture-perfect life in Canada, Shannon moves her family to the jungled slopes of Kauai in search of a more laid-back existence. But instead of fresh mangoes and good surf, she finds herself swept into a tide of unexpected revelations.?

In the crucible of motherhood, Shannon’s two sons and husband become unlikely teachers, reflecting her forgotten pieces with unrelenting love and occasional ferocity. Their struggles crack her open in ways no self-help book ever could. When deep-seated heartache has her seeking transformation, an invitation to drink ayahuasca becomes a lifeline. Guided by ancient wisdom and insatiable curiosity, Shannon begins the journey of remembering who she truly was—and still is.

More than a memoir of healing, The Mother Vine is a love letter to the mess of motherhood, the mystery of the medicine path, and the sacred power of being fully alive. If you’ve ever longed for something deeper, this book is for you.

Lisa K. Richter is a poet and writer based in southern California. She studied classical piano, earned a BA in mathematics from U.Va. and an MFA in fiction from Antioch. A poetry participant at The Community of Writers, her work has been featured in literary journals and anthologies. She grew up on the east coast, lived years in Europe where her daughter and son were born, and now resides with her partner Paul in Laguna Beach, California.

A captivating memoir about midlife desire and a woman’s quest to let go.

Fly, My Darling explores the resilience of love, the weight of loss, the undeniable pull toward freedom, and the transformation that occurs when a woman finally asks, What do I really want?

Lisa—classical pianist, wife, and mother—yearns for something she can’t define. When she begins a study of jazz improv with a musician from the ‘70s girl band era, a woman with a renegade past who encourages her to let go both musically and emotionally, life takes an unexpected, irrevocable turn.

With rhythmic, imaginative prose, the author paints a deeply immersive world, bringing to life moments of music, eroticism, loss, and renewal with breathtaking elegance. Based on her years together with musician and visionary composer Lynda Roth, past and present weave together in this profoundly moving memoir.