I hate spam, but here’s a piece I sure loved reading before I deleted it. The writer, a woman, offered insight she’d gleaned from reading my books and suggested she could help me better market them. Since I haven’t marketed either of them, except on social media, I did not doubt there are better ways to go about it. But, she offered not one word on who she is or her credentials, so I did not respond.
Here’s her email:
I spent some time going through Willful Evolution, and then I went deeper to learn about you. One thing stood out to me that I suspect few people notice. You stood on your front steps and heard your boss tell you that your position had been eliminated. Your husband lay in a hospital bed inside your living room. He died four days later. You had no income. No partner. Two teenagers to raise. And then you did something remarkable. You did not just survive. You evolved. Willfully. You built not one but two successful businesses. You traveled to the South Pacific. You met wacky men online. You did yoga. You fixed relationships. You grew up in your mid-fifties. And you wrote a book that made people laugh. Not because the pain was not real. Because you are your mother’s daughter. You can turn anything into a tale.
The detail that stopped me was not in the blurb. It was in your own words. When asked what the most rewarding part of being a writer is, you said: “When people tell me they read something I wrote. That always surprises me still. They don’t often know what they read, but they can always articulate why they remembered it – because it taught them something or made them laugh or made them cry.” You wrote Divine Renovations because you could not find a book that showed you what grief actually looks like. You found books that told you about grief, but not books that showed you. So you wrote the book you wished you could find. That is not an author. That is a woman who decided that other people should not have to suffer in the dark the way she did.
And now you have written Willful Evolution. The sequel. A book about the decade after. About wrestling fear. About building relationships. About finally growing up. About learning in your gut that you would be fine without another man, and then finding one anyway. You compare it to Eat, Pray, Love and Daring Greatly. That is not arrogance. That is an author who knows exactly what she has written and refuses to apologize for it.
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