Books & Writing
I write about family, adversity, identity and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.
Sometimes those stories begin with what happened to us. Sometimes they begin with a question, a character or a piece of family history that refuses to let go.
Either way, I keep coming back to the same territory: what we inherit, what we carry, what we outgrow and what becomes possible when we begin to see our lives differently.
From the family photographs that helped inspire Natural Weather.
Fiction
Natural Weather
A multigenerational family saga about the lives we build, the stories we inherit and the complicated art of choosing again.
Alice Swanson grows up in the middle of five daughters in a crowded Connecticut house where obstacles are something to work around and almost anything can be made to function.
At twenty, she crosses the country for California. By twenty-one, she is raising an infant in an Army tent at the edge of a redwood forest, building a life from other people’s fruit, borrowed lumber and the conviction that almost anything can become an adventure.
Decades later, Alice has three daughters, a career she loves, a beautiful home and a thirty-year marriage she has spent much of her adult life holding together. When that marriage finally ends, she has to confront a harder question: whether the qualities that helped her build a remarkable life – loyalty, endurance, competence and the ability to make almost anything work – have also kept her from choosing what she wants.
Natural Weather is my first novel. It was inspired in part by stories from my mother’s life, including the years she raised a baby in an Army tent among the California redwoods.
“Sometimes you don’t know what you’re holding until you let it go.”
Nonfiction
Relentless Optimism & Other Life Goals
What if the hardest chapter of your life became the turning point that set you free?
Relentless Optimism & Other Life Goals is part memoir, part guide to the mindset shifts that help us move through adversity without pretending it didn’t hurt.
Drawing on my own experiences with upheaval, betrayal, loss and reinvention, the book explores what happens when the life you expected disappears and you have to decide what comes next.
It isn’t a book about blind positivity or finding a silver lining before you’re ready. It’s about learning to see what is true, reclaim your own voice and recognize that even when you cannot change what happened, you still have agency over what you build from it.
Through personal stories, reflection and practical tools, Relentless Optimism & Other Life Goals offers a framework for moving forward with greater clarity, confidence and self-trust.
Available in hardcover, paperback and ebook.