THEY tell you to write the book you’re afraid to write. But let’s be honest: It’s scary to write any book. There’s the fear you won’t be able to write it. The fear you’ll write it and won’t be able to sell it. The fear you’ll sell it and it will flop. There’s even the fear your book will be a huge success, which would lead to pressure to be a public figure and write a follow-up just as popular.
But that’s not what the experts mean. What they mean is you should write from the depth of your soul, make yourself vulnerable, uncover hidden truths and express them in interesting ways. That book you wish you could devour as a reader? The one that makes you feel seen and understood and forever changed by the experience? That’s the book they’re telling you to write.
And that’s terrifying.
I was a traditionally published children’s book author with three middle-grade novels and a picture book under my belt, but none of the books I’d written so far had terrified me. I’d mined my childhood and my loved ones’ childhoods to craft stories filled with humor and heart. It all felt relatively safe.
I had other stories I was itching to tell, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to bare my soul in that way. I didn’t think I had the guts. But then my adult daughter, Faith, pushed me to try. Faith is a licensed social worker therapist, sexual assault survivor, and activist. She’s fearless, passionate—an open book. But she almost didn’t make it out of high school alive. So when she asked me to write a memoir about how we survived her adolescence, I knew that was the book I was afraid to write.
