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Set against the backdrop of vibrant 1980s LA, this wild and intimate debut memoir follows a young woman’s quest for marriage, meaning, and lasting happiness. At thirty-two, Laurie outgrows her sleepy beach town and moves to the epicenter of the anything-goes eighties: Los Angeles. There, she befriends a teenage wizard and a Russian defector. She enrolls in a Hogwarts-style psychic college. She gets a job at a hilltop Hindu convent, where she considers taking her monastic vows. She dates an Indian guru and shares heart-to-heart conversations with a Catholic priest. But it is only when her home nearly burns to the ground that Laurie finds what she is looking for: her true calling. Reading passages from a cache of 300 old diaries that were spared by the flames, Laurie locates clues planted in her past and gradually comes to a realization: She must let go of the conventional, “white-picket fence” marital vow she has sought for decades, and instead must fashion an entirely different kind of vow for herself. With this knowledge in hand, Laurie sets about fulfilling her sacred contract. In turn, she experiences for the first time an intense rightness—a sense that this is how her life is meant to be. Author: Laurie Collister Publication Date: April 7, 2026 -
For fans of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Lab Girl, an arresting memoir that chronicles a young woman’s journey from remote island research to Big Pharma and the boardroom. Elizabeth “Betsy” Aden, a twenty-something anthropology student, is clinging to academia as a safety net—until she’s offered a grant to spend the summer on a remote island in Melanesia, famously home to cannibals. Adventure calls, and Betsy doesn’t hesitate. Once she arrives, though, reality hits: no running water, no electricity, and no Western medicine. Inspired by her experiences, Betsy returns to school with a new perspective and changes her field from cultural anthropology to biomedical anthropology. Driven by a new purpose, she returns to Melanesia for two years to study the transmission hepatitis B and sets up an ingenious field laboratory to collect and test blood samples. Back at home, resourceful and determined Elizabeth successfully navigates the complicated “boys club” of academia. She explores teaching and advertising and finds a fit in biotech from which she builds a career in Big Pharma. That choice, along with her tenacity and willingness to take risks, propels Elizabeth on a meteoric rise to the senior executive suite in a large Swiss company and into the boardrooms of scrappy biotech companies. With electric detail and candid honesty, Mud, Microbes, and Medicine is a testimony of resilience and resolve in the face of challenges so large and unimaginable, you will wonder how Elizabeth’s story could even be true. Author: Elizabeth Reed Aden Publication Date: April 21, 2026 -
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. Author: Lisa K. Richter Publication Date: April 21, 2026 -
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. Author: Shannon Nering Publication Date: April 21, 2026 -
For James Herriot fans and pet lovers, a modern-day, funny-yet-poignant memoir about what it is like to be the only person in a small family not employed in the veterinary profession. Patti Eddington should have known when she married her veterinary student boyfriend that she would spend anniversary and birthday dinners not sitting at tables at fancy restaurants but kneeling under a surgery table in a cocktail dress, desperately trying to mop up a steady stream of blood and urine with cheap paper towels. She should have guessed that every knock at the door or ring of the phone would mean her husband would be torn away from the family for hours—sometimes returning deflated, sometimes smiling. But she could never have dreamed that her beautiful, curly-haired young daughter would one day bathe and sleep with an inflatable tick (until the day it was mysteriously punctured by a salad fork) or that she would go through her marriage of forty-five years opening every freezer door with caution. Don’t Look in the Freezer is a humorous, poignant, loving look into the sometimes strange, mostly unglamorous, life of a veterinarian’s wife. Patti’s little family is not at all like that of famous veterinarian James Herriot’s—but is still absolutely filled with compassion and love for animals and the people who adore them. Author: Patti Eddington Publication Date: April 28, 2026 -
Ever since Eve was banned from the garden, women have endured the oftentimes painful and inaccurate definitions foisted upon them by the patriarchy. Maiden, mother, and crone, representing the three stages assigned to a woman’s life cycle, have been the limiting categories of both ancient and modern (neo-pagan) mythology. And one label in particular rankles: crone. The word conjures a wizened hag—useless for the most part, marginalized by appearance and ability. None of us has ever truly fit the old-crone image, and for today’s midlife women, a new archetype is being birthed: the creatrix. In Creatrix Rising, Stephanie Raffelock lays out—through personal stories and essays—the highlights of the past fifty years, in which women have gone from a quiet strength to a resounding voice. She invites us along on her own transformational journey by providing probing questions for reflection so that we can flesh out and bring to life this new archetype within ourselves. If what the Dalai Lama has predicted—that women will save the world—proves true, then the creatrix will for certain be out front, leading the pack. Author: Stephanie Raffelock Publication Date: August 24, 2021 -
When Adrienne Rubin enters into the jewelry business in 1970s Los Angeles, she is a maverick in a world dominated by men. She soon meets a young hotshot salesman who doesn’t seem to struggle at all, and when he asks her to be his partner, she is excited to join him. She doesn’t know him well, but she does know his father, and she believes he is as trustworthy as the day is long . . . Diamonds and Scoundrels shows us how a woman in a man’s world, with tenacity and sheer determination, can earn respect and obtain a true sense of accomplishment. Following Rubin’s experiences in the jewelry industry through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s—with the ups and downs, good guys and bad—this is a tale of personal growth, of how to overcome challenges with courage and resilience. It’s a story for the woman today who, in addition to a rich family life, seeks a self-realized, fulfilling path toward a life well lived. Author: Adrienne Rubin Publication Date: September 17, 2019 -
“With courage and heart, Susan Hadler embarks upon a difficult journey to find the lost and forgotten members of her fragmented family. Along the way, she uncovers the family’s decades-old pain and sometimes shame―all with the hope of healing and reconciliation. Her story shows how loss, denial, and stigma can drain us, and also how forgiveness and compassion can restore us. Her unique blend of talents―equal parts writer, psychologist, and bloodhound hot on the trail―make for highly engaging and relatable reading. No one who reads this book will ever look at his or her own family history the same way again.” —David A. Lande, National Geographic senior researcher and author of I Was with Patton Where are they now, the lost, the forgotten? With the love in her mother’s silence as her guide, Susan Johnson Hadler began a quest to find out who the missing people in her family were and what happened to them. The search led her to Germany, where her father was killed just before the end of WWII; then to a Buddhist monastery in France, where she learned new ways to relate to life and death; and ultimately to a state mental hospital in Ohio, where the family abandoned her mother’s older sister years earlier. She believed that her aunt had died—but Hadler, to her great surprise, found her still alive at age ninety-four. And the story didn’t end there. Captivating and often heart-wrenching, The Beauty of What Remains is a story of liberating a family from secrets, ghosts, and untold pain; of reuniting four generations shattered by shame and fear; and of finding the ineffable beauty in what remains. Author: Susan Johnson Hadler Publication Date: September 15, 2015 -
When Janice learns that she has stage four cancer, she feels the sand in life’s hourglass begin to escape through her fingers. A successful trial lawyer, she’s spent her entire adulthood competing, clock watching, and chasing the money while life slipped by unnoticed. But this diagnosis leaves her questioning whether it’s all been worth it. In this candid memoir, Janice reflects on the choices she made throughout her life to bring her to this point. She offers an insider’s view of Big Law and questions corporate America’s relationship with wealth and excess. She examines how one’s longing for approval—from family or elsewhere—comes at the expense of knowing what we want and being our true selves. And she discovers that the remedy is a long, hard road to travel. Earnest, tender, and eye-opening, Life’s Hourglass inspires readers to ask themselves, “How do I want to spend the days I have remaining?” Author: Janice Mock Publication Date: October 6, 2020 -
“A compelling, intimately personal, insightful, and ultimately inspirational account, Painting Life: My Creative Journey Through Trauma, is very highly recommended for both community and academic library collections.” ―Midwest Book “Carol is an evolved being and talented storyteller. I found her spiritual approach to work and life truly inspirational. She shares very personal, intense, powerful life experiences that have guided her on a path to help her integrate her emotional and spiritual health. Painting Life is a gem that offers healing insights for all of us to treasure.” ―Louis deSabla, publisher of Pathways Magazine When Carol Walsh pulled her fiancé from the bottom of a diving well—dead from a massive heart attack—her life was turned upside down. Even though she was a psychotherapist working with clients suffering from trauma, this personal shock felt unbearable. Nonetheless, she had to heal herself while supporting clients—and, as a single mother, her two children. Using the creative interests she’d developed during childhood in order to emotionally save herself from a difficult mother, she fully recovered from her grief and PTSD symptoms—and as she recreated her personal, artistic, and professional life, she began to thrive. Author: Carol Walsh Publication Date: November 15, 2016 -
Kim Fairley was twenty-four when she fell in love with and married a man who was fifty-seven. Something about Vern—his quirkiness, his humor, his devilish smile—made her feel an immediate connection with him. She quickly became pregnant, but instead of the idyllic interlude she’d imagined as she settled into married life and planned for their family, their love was soon tested by the ghosts of Vern’s past—a town, a house, a family, a memory. Shooting Out the Lights is a real-life mystery that explores the challenges faced in a loving marriage, the ongoing, wrenching aftermath of gun violence and the healing that comes with confronting the past. Publication Date: July 27, 2021 Author: Kim Fairley -
Perfect for anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes of the ballet world, a rousing memoir of a brash young ballerina from a dysfunctional family who achieves her greatest dream only to realize—as she begins to find success—that she’s gay. With a priest for a father and a magician for a mother, Emily Sayre Smith was always going to have an interesting life—for better and for worse. Here, she recounts what it was like coming of age in Texas and Arizona in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s in a decidedly dysfunctional family. To escape her turbulent family life, Emily throws herself into her ballet classes, where she can dance out the anxiety in her body and take refuge in fantasy worlds. Driven by the dream of being a ballerina, she earns scholarships and lead roles, studies in London for two years, and eventually lands back in Tucson, where she joins a fledgling ballet company and falls in love—with a woman and with marijuana. Join Emily as she survives her troubled family, hangs out with dance royalty, saves Martha Graham, meets the Queen of England, slings hash in a diner, discovers her sexuality, and tries to figure out how it’s all going fit together in her ballerina world in this story of a brave and sometimes bumbling girl charging her way through life. Author: Emily Sayre Smith Publication Date: October 7, 2025 -
For fans of The Good Wife and Suits, the true story of a passionately principled young female judge in the man’s world of the ’60s and ’70s who is forced to defend her judgeship against two male challengers in a grueling election—while pregnant with her second child. Janet Kintner could have ended up just another victim of the system. Abused as a child, sexually assaulted as a young woman, the odds were not in her favor—but instead of letting these experiences destroy her, she used them as fuel in pursuit of her dreams. By twenty-four, she was a newly minted lawyer determined to secure justice for everyone, regardless of their gender, race, religion, or income. In 1968, the District Attorney’s office told Kintner, “We will not hire a woman lawyer.” Men dominated the legal system. Undaunted, she established herself as a lawyer who represented low-income people and, eventually, as a high-profile prosecutor specializing in consumer fraud. San Diego lawyers elected her the third woman ever to the County Bar Association Board of Directors. In her private practice, she continued to help everyone she could, often pro bono. In 1976, when Kintner was thirty-one and pregnant, Governor Jerry Brown appointed her the third female judge in history in San Diego—a move that didn’t sit well with some men in her field. Two years later, two men challenged Kintner, a mother pregnant with her second baby, in the nastiest judicial election of the year. In the coming months, Kintner struggled to balance her time between her children, working full-time in a stressful job, and campaigning. She didn’t want to let other women, present and future, down. But was San Diego ready to elect a female judge? Author: Janet Kintner Publication Date: December 2, 2025 -
If you believe in the power of dreams and intentions, this inspirational coming-of-age memoir set in 1950s Australia where an immigrant girl swimmer turns challenges and disappointments into opportunities for success is for you. Henny was just a little girl when she experienced brutal violence and hunger in WWII Amsterdam, but she is now a teenage immigrant swimmer in 1950s Australia where she must learn to turn challenges into success. She is smart, she swims fast, and she has definite opinions about the kind of woman she intends to be. She hears the timeless Land speak and sees the Southern Cross as a beacon when she walks in the bush with her father. She enjoys swimming star fame and championship victories and turns to the pool in her search to belong, to face fears and dashed hopes, until at every turn she sees more clearly her unique path ahead. “Intentions are like prayers, if you pay attention they come back as destiny,” her mother has taught her. Is it intention or destiny that propels this young New Australian into her future long life? Author: Hendrika de Vries Publication Date: September 2, 2025 -
For readers in search of emotional and spiritual healing, a courageous, gripping memoir of one woman’s journey of gradually healing her traumatized memory through poetry, swimming, and the intuited guidance of a spiritual presence named Voice. Words Make a Way through Fire is an intimate, courageous memoir of a woman shattered by witnessing her eldest brother’s horrific suicide when she was a teenager. The book traces her creative journey of recovery and healing with poetry as a constant companion. The primary means of Cyra Dumitru’s healing process, from age sixteen through adulthood, is writing poetry and journaling. During this decades-long journey, Cyra experiences a transcendent, loving presence called Voice who guides her and helps her imagine wholeness. She finds community with others through the sharing of poems. She studies poetry as craft and as medicine—becoming a published poet with multiple books, an award-winning college instructor of poetry writing, and a certified practitioner of poetic medicine who creates spaces where others can heal through poetry. In Words Make a Way through Fire, Cyra explores the specific medicinal properties of poetry—giving order to interior anxiety, trusting the wisdom within—and invites her brother David to speak through her as he reflects upon his final hours. In doing so, poem by poem, she shifts gradually from being traumatized and feeling haunted to feeling empowered and spiritually expansive. Author: Cyra Sweet Dumitru Publication Date: September 2, 2025 -
For readers inspired by Margaret Busby’s New Daughters of Africa, Juliet Cutler presents a stunning testament to a group of Maasai women who are claiming their voices and shaping a future of lasting change. In this inspiring collection of interviews and portraits, over twenty Maasai women share the ways education has transformed their lives by giving them the tools to overcome poverty and empowering them to make profound differences in their communities. Through their stories, the women featured in Lessons in Hope lay bare the overwhelming challenges many Maasai women and girls continue to face. For some, hunger hovers nearby, only one bad drought away. Many must raise children without running water or electricity. Most struggle to gain a basic education, see a doctor, or earn an income. And too many Maasai girls still endure female genital mutilation, early forced marriages, and other forms of violence. Yet these remarkable women have overcome the odds. As graduates of the first school for Maasai girls in East Africa, these thriving leaders now hold positions in education, health care, nonprofits, government, and business. Their stories reveal a cadre of Maasai women working toward positive change within their own culture and offering a compelling, optimistic vision for the future. Proceeds from the sale of this book support education for Maasai girls. Author: Juliet Cutler Publication Date: September 9, 2025 -
A debut memoir for fans of Love Warrior—a candid account of the emotional and psychological pain of infidelity and divorce; and the journey of a lifetime that one woman took to heal. Few things can shatter our hearts like expectations. Sarah expected to live happily ever after. She expected her husband to honor his vows. She expected his military helicopter to land safely. But when the unimaginable occurred and her world unraveled so magnificently, the undoing of her expectations left her on her knees, fighting for her life. When everything we “expect” crumbles like ash after a fire, how do we reconcile what was lost? One courageous step at a time. Sarah packed her car, then set out to hike and camp across the country. But pain, codependence, and trauma challenged her as she moved forward. From a sailboat to a yoga studio, a therapist’s couch to a shaman’s ceremony, from selling everything and moving into a van—on the ashes of her former expectations, Sarah rebuilt, from the inside out. She Journeys is a testament to the transformative power of healing. From darkness to light, from a marriage ended to a life reclaimed, we are reminded that it never matters how we begin. Only that we do. From wounds to wisdom, She is every woman who must find her way from heartbreak to homecoming. Author: Sarah May Publication Date: September 9, 2025 -
For readers who found comfort in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a 9/11 widow’s memoir of rediscovering joy and finding love again after the violent loss of her husband. One sunny Tuesday morning, Maryellen Donovan’s beloved husband, Steve Cherry, lost his life in the 9/11 attacks—rocking her to her core, and changing her family forever. Maryellen’s life and love with Steve was all she could have hoped for; in the wake of his death, she was inconsolable. But ultimately, she had no choice but to be strong for her two young sons—and even when deep in the grip of hopeless despair, she found solace in her deep faith and belief that, with the support of friends and family, she would eventually find love and happiness once again. Her route to her happy ending proved long and winding and full of obstacles—cancer, family conflict, even more loss—but she always found a way forward, no matter the setbacks she encountered. An inspirational story that will provide hope to anyone who’s experienced unfathomable loss and loneliness, The Road to Yesterday is a testament to the idea that there is always a path to love and joy—if only you’re determined enough to keep yourself open to it. Author: Maryellen Donovan Publication Date: September 9, 2025 -
Fans of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild will root for Anne Abel as she intrepidly sets out alone for Australia at the age of sixty, seeking to capture some Bruce Springsteen energy and fight off her lifelong, debilitating depression. At the age of fifty-nine, Anne has never been to a concert. Then, she reluctantly goes to a Bruce Springsteen concert—a man she knows nothing about—to spend time with her son and daughter-in-law. For three-plus hours Bruce Springsteen’s energy, humanity, and enthusiasm lift her out of her lifelong depression and makes her feel alive. A year later, due to increasing classroom violence where she taught, Anne walks out the door thinking, I’m never coming back. But, getting into her car to go home, she realizes that because she suffers with severe recurrent depression, without the structure and focus of teaching she will be at risk for falling into a deep depression. She’s been inpatient twice at a psychiatric hospital, had three regimens of electroconvulsive shock therapy, and tried over twenty medications. Anne needs a new and different plan. Then she remembers: in four months Bruce Springsteen will be touring in Australia. So even though Anne hates to travel and be alone, she books the trip. Eight concerts, five cities, twenty-six days. She hopes that harnessing some of Bruce Springsteen’s energy will keep her out of the abyss. Anne doesn’t go on this trip to change. But much to her surprise, she returns home a different person. Author: Anne Abel Publication Date: September 23, 2025 -
For fans of McCarthy’s Bar, a debut memoir about a woman’s humorous and poignant solo adventures of self-discovery on Ireland’s backroads following a painful divorce. When an introverted, divorced, middle-aged mother and school librarian from the Midwest decides to leave her comfort zone and travel alone to Ireland, her desire to fulfill her dream overcomes her fear as she immerses herself into what will become an adventure of courage and self-discovery. Motivated by her love of Irish music and Celtic spirituality, along with her desire to find healing from depression and divorce, Diane sets off for Ireland, a country she’s been obsessed with for years. Her romantic preconceptions of the Emerald Isle quickly clash with reality, however, and while there she faces many obstacles, including driving the narrow, ill-marked roads throughout the countryside she traverses. Nevertheless, this first sojourn leads to three more trips over the next six years, and she gradually learns to navigate Ireland’s back roads—not to mention her own personal and spiritual roads toward self-discovery and acceptance. This heartfelt and humorous account of Diane’s adventures—including hanging out with an Irish rock band, traveling remote roads in search of a hermit nun, and meeting her favorite Irish musician not once but twice—is sure to inspire readers to get outside their own comfort zones and take some rewarding risks of their own. Author: Diane Hartman Publishing Date: September 30, 2025 -
For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a memoir of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her teenage son and save her marriage when she finds herself triggered by memories of her own childhood trauma as he enters adolescence. At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan’s rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her. Until it wasn’t. Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son’s high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family. In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage. Author: Shigeko Ito Publication Date: October 7, 2025 -
Raw and wickedly funny, this debut memoir details one woman’s recovery from her emotional eating disorder, while navigating divorce, discrimination, motherhood, and the madness that is Tinder dating. A riot of dark humor beginning with her dysfunctional childhood in outback Australia, Jane McGuinness details her recovery from an emotional eating disorder with dry wit, discovering that hers is something of a curious social experiment. Exploring themes of patriarchy and discrimination against the overweight, Jane walks away from her long-term marriage, returns to grad school while raising her three children in a foreign country, and transforms her health. Hiking the Camino de Santiago through Spain and adventures in Greece are regaled with self-deprecating fervor, while horrifying post-divorce Tinder dating will leave the reader amused and aghast in equal measure. This debut memoir is truly a transformative journey in every sense, as Jane discovered that it was never food that she hungered for after all. Author: Jane McGuinness Publication Date: October 14, 2025 -
For readers of I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy and The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, a candid and heart-wrenching memoir about child abuse, family secrets, and the healing that begins once the truth is revealed and the past is confronted. Andrea is four and a half the first time her father, David, gives her a bath. Although she is young, she knows there is something strange about the way he is touching her. When her mother, Marlene, walks in to check on them, she howls and crumples to the floor—and when she opens her eyes, she is blind. Marlene’s hysterical blindness lasts for weeks, but her willful blindness lasts decades. The abuse continues, and Andrea spends a childhood living with a secret she can’t tell and a shame she is too afraid to name. Despite it, she survives. She builds a life and tells herself she is fine. But at age thirty-three, an unwanted grope on a New York City subway triggers her past. Suddenly unable to remember how to forget, Andrea is forced to confront her past—and finally begin to heal. This brave debut offers honest insight into a survivor’s journey. Readers will feel Andrea’s pain, her fear, and her shame—yet they will also feel her hope. And like Andrea, they will come to understand an important truth: though healing is complicated, it is possible to find joy and even grace in the wake of the most profound betrayals. Author: Andrea Leeb -
For fans of Suzanne Heywood’s Wavewalker and Cea Sunrise Person’s North of Normal comes Leslie Johansen Nack’s emotional follow-up memoir about her battle with addiction following a traumatic childhood—and her inspiring journey toward healing and happiness. In the mid-1970s, Leslie Nack’s family returned from sailing to French Polynesia and began the integration process into American life again, which included being tossed back and forth between an alcoholic, mentally ill mother and an abusive, overbearing father. To find love and acceptance, Leslie chases a myth that throws her into the path of nefarious older men, where she eventually falls into drug and alcohol addiction. Her father dies in his plane in the jungles of Mexico when Leslie is nineteen, but his abuse lingers in her psyche. She spirals, her only solace her next fix—until, somehow, she finds the grace, despite her abjectly dysfunctional family background, to believe in her worth. This newfound self-love changes everything for her, and finally she is able to find her way to sobriety and recovery. Raw and intense but ultimately hopeful, this sequel to the popular memoir Fourteen tells the rest of Nack’s turbulent—and incredible—story. Author: Leslie Johansen Nack Publication Date: October 14, 2025
