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

The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared is the story I was born to tell. After years of work, I’m thrilled to announce that it’s forthcoming from Motina Books on February 18, 2025.

Congratulations to the 2023 Aurora Polaris Prize Finalists Kee Kee Buckley, Seeking Shama Robin Clarke, Those Little Anodynes Martha-Grace Duncan, Death of a Dreamer Justin Florey, The Skinny Kid Christina Galineau, Almanac Elyse Hauser, Salt and Shadows Deborah Derrikson Kiossman, What We Hold Onto Katherine Riegel, Our Bodies are Mostly Water Terese Svoboda, Hitler and My Mother-In-Law Casey Walsh, The Full Catastrophe


BIG NEWS!

THE FULL CATASTROPHE: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared has been named a finalist in the Trio House Press 2023 Aurora Polaris Award! I’m so honored to have made the list.

Zorba the Greek 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. After years of work, I’m thrilled to announce that it’s forthcoming from Motina Books on February 18, 2025.

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 20, 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.

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