Casey Mulligan Walsh

Casey Mulligan Walsh

-embracing the full catastrophe-

-embracing the full catastrophe-

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Casey Mulligan Walsh

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
-Joseph Campbell

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Casey needs a family of her own: the joys and the sorrows, people who love her, and a place she belongs—what Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe”—and she’s determined to make it happen.

Adrift in the world after losing her father to a heart attack when she was eleven and her mother to cancer soon after, the death of her only sibling eight years later strengthens her resolve.

Casey marries, has three children, and though she struggles with grief and a shaky sense of her place in the world, she thinks she’s found the life she’s longed for. But soon it’s clear her marriage isn’t the dream she envisioned. When her husband’s behavior shifts from troubling to destructive, a contentious divorce and custody trial propel her family into a catastrophe she never imagined. Searching for meaning, Casey embraces the spirituality she’s sought in various forms since her youngest years. Then the unthinkable happens—her twenty-year-old son Eric dies—and she’s left to make sense of her family’s collapse and the sudden yet somehow inevitable loss of her beloved boy.

A profoundly moving tribute to the power of love, The Full Catastrophe is the story of a life of loss and sorrow transformed into one of hope and redemption. With hard-won wisdom, Casey shows us how peace and belonging can only be found within ourselves.

The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared

has been named:

2025 Independent Author Network (IAN) Grand Prize/First Place: Nonfiction Book of the Year
2025 Indie Author Project Runner Up: Memoir
2025 Readers’ Favorite Gold Medal: Nonfiction/Women’s
PenCraft Awards Best Book Summer 2025: Nonfiction/Memoir
2025 PenCraft Awards Runner Up: Nonfiction/Memoir
2025 International Book Awards Finalist: Autobiography/Memoir

Order your copy of The Full Catastrophe at:

…and at your local bookshop

For SIGNED COPIES of The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared,
order from Battenkill Books, my beautiful hometown bookshop in Cambridge, New York.

“The Full Catastrophe reveals how tragedy can become a path to freedom… Punctuated by loss, this moving memoir testifies to how home is about love, not perfection.” -FOREWORD INDIES 

“The Full Catastrophe is a memoir about burdens—those people are forced to carry and those they choose to shoulder… Walsh has carried the pain of bereavement, the fear of loss, and the desperate desire for family and belonging…her memories and reflections will serve as a light for others in the darkest of times.” -INDEPENDENT BOOK REVIEW

“The author is unflinchingly honest and vulnerable, examining her deep well of trauma-induced loneliness and her desperate love for her children…Walsh’s prose is accessible and heartfelt. A stirring and relatable portrait of a struggling family.” -KIRKUS (RECOMMENDED REVIEW)

“A memoir about connection, disconnection, and the odd dichotomy of grief and joy which often arrives hand-in-hand to stymie the heart…a full-bodied experiential flavor that is as much immersed in life as in death.” -MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW“A searingly beautiful testament to all the ways loss yields to love.” -Claire Bidwell Smith, author of Conscious Grieving

“What Walsh learned through loss, heartbreak, disappointment, and new love brings hope to all of her lucky readers.” –Ann Hood, author of Comfort: A Journey Through Grief

“The Full Catastrophe is a profoundly moving examination of grief and resilience…this book is a triumph and an inspiration.”
-Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House

“My heart feels forever altered by this profoundly moving search for home and connection and meaning in a world rocked by loss. The Full Catastrophe is fully engaging, fully human, fully wrenching, fully healing, fully, ferociously alive.” -Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis

“The Full Catastrophe is a story of resilience that has a lot to teach us about honoring our grief and forgiving fate.” -Katherine Wilemon, founder/CEO of The Family Heart Foundation

“This heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful and gorgeously redemptive memoir reveals how one brave woman embraces the wrenching but also tender imperfection that defines the human family and, in so doing, makes her life her own.” -Jeannine Ouellette, author of The Part That Burns

“In this beautifully written book, Walsh refuses the simple titles of victim or heroine, instead showing us what it truly means to embody the roles of daughter, wife and mother in the face of profound life-shattering loss.” -Meghan Riordan Jarvis, author of  End of the Hour and Can Anyone Tell Me?

“A candid and spare look at motherhood, grief, and what it means to claim a life of one’s own…Walsh’s journey shows the potential for a life well-lived, even in the midst of great tragedy. -Kelly Sundberg, author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl and The Answer is in the Wound

Click HERE for bonus content, including:
*The Full Catastrophe Spotify Playlist
*Excerpt from The Full Catastrophe
*Reading Guide containing 22 book club discussion questions
*Five Ways to Support Those Who Grieve and Resource List

“Am I not a man? Of course I’ve been married. Wife, house, kids, everything…the full catastrophe!” -Zorba, “Zorba the Greek,” the movie

Zorba embraced “the full catastrophe” of life. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this as “the poignant enormity of our life experience.”  He explains that the full catastrophe “captures something positive about the human spirit’s ability to come to grips with what is most difficult in life and to find within it the room to grow in strength and wisdom…facing the full catastrophe means finding and coming to terms with what is most human in ourselves.”

 The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared is the story I was born to tell. We Were the Mulvaneys and The Rules of Inheritance meet Beautiful Boy in this tale of search for family, resilience, and the power of love in the face of a relentless litany of roadblocks and tragedy. Along the way, bullying and isolation, emotional abuse and depression, addiction, ADHD, the poorly made decisions of youth, and the devastating fallout of being in the wrong place at the wrong time are among the factors that alter the course of each of our lives. None of us is as hopelessly caught in this tangled web or pays as dearly as my beloved, adventure-seeking firstborn son, who dies at age twenty, leaving us to figure out how to go on without him.

Facing these obstacles and struggling to find meaning beyond mere survival, I embrace the spirituality I’ve sought in various forms since my youngest years. Relying on my love of music and language and the penchant for seeing life as a series of cinematic moments, I find family in unexpected places and learn to see the world through new eyes.

For updates about book news, related publications, and the writing process, as well as topics related to grief, finding meaning, and embracing the in-between (along with occasional  news about cardiovascular health) please sign up for my newsletter below. I’d love to stay in touch.

The Full Catastrophe Book Trailers

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