Currently writing
The Witness Bearer
How much of herself can a woman give away before there is nothing left that belongs to her?
The Witness Bearer explores the quiet rebellions of women who spend their lives being exactly who the world expects them to be.
Spanning five decades, it follows Katherine, a sharp-witted, but proper West Texas obituary writer who has spent her life being the woman everyone expects her to be, at the expense of the woman she wanted to become. Beneath her respectable exterior lie extraordinary grief, complicated loyalties, and a secret she has kept for decades. Writing to a solider she loved and lost in Vietnam are her one quiet act of rebellion and her only connection to the person she wanted to be.
Set against the deeply rooted conservatism of rural America and a changing cultural landscape, the novel explores the invisible costs of being a good wife, a good mother, and a good woman. At its heart, The Witness Bearer asks whether a woman can ever truly claim her own story when she has spent a lifetime living in service of everyone else's, and what it really means to tell your own story and have it known.
Currently writing
But Did You Die?
What happens when the thing that was supposed to kill you doesn't, but you're not exactly okay, either?
But Did You Die? explores the messy, often absurd intersection of grit, resilience, and psychological recovery, and what happens when the very things that help us survive become the things that keep us from healing.
Part narrative, part psychological exploration, it follows a psychologist, mother, and self-proclaimed questionable survivor through a series of experiences that range from heartbreaking to downright ridiculous. From raising a child with profound autism to surviving a hot air balloon crash, confronting a husband's seemingly terminal diagnosis, and discovering that even a psychologist can have a spectacularly unhealthy relationship with her own coping skills, the book challenges much of what we think we know about resilience.
With irreverent humor, uncomfortable honesty, and a healthy skepticism of psychology's favorite self-help narratives, But Did You Die? questions our cultural obsession with grit, our tendency to mistake functioning for healing, and the dangerous assumption that surviving something means we've recovered from it.
At its heart, But Did You Die? asks a deceptively uncomfortable question: What if getting back up isn't the same thing as getting better? And what happens when the person who has spent her life teaching other people how to cope realizes she might have been doing it wrong herself?
More works in progress will be added here as they take shape.