At some point, a person writing one memoir can claim healing.
A person writing two memoirs can still make a decent case for artistic exploration.
A person writing three books in the same emotional universe probably has to admit there is a problem.
So here I am, admitting it: I have a writing problem.
Not a cute one, either. Not the kind where I sit in linen pants beside a window, sipping tea, waiting for inspiration to descend like a tasteful bird. My writing problem is more feral than that. It looks like me hunched over a laptop for years, trying to make sense of things that refused to become sensible. It looks like drafts stacked on drafts, scenes rewritten until the original wound is barely visible beneath all the language I kept throwing at it. It looks like editors, beta readers, friends, late nights, bad coffee, emotional excavation, and me staring into the middle distance like the ghost of a woman who thought writing would be therapeutic and accidentally built a trilogy.
The Terrible Love Memoirs were not born from strategy.
They were born from need.
I needed somewhere to put the stories. I needed a place for the questions that would not leave me alone. I needed to understand love, longing, motherhood, marriage, ambition, betrayal, grief, faith, shame, survival, and all the strange little human decisions that seem irrational until you are the person making them.
So I wrote.
At first, I think I wrote because I needed to survive my own thoughts. Then I kept writing because the pages became the only place where I could tell the truth without immediately managing someone else’s reaction to it. Eventually, somehow, the work became bigger than the original ache. It became a record of evolution. Not clean evolution. Not the kind with a tidy before-and-after photo where the lighting is suspiciously flattering. More like molting. Messy, exposed, deeply inconvenient.
These books are still works in progress.
That feels important to say.
They have been edited and rewritten and rearranged. They have been read by people I trust. They have been loved, questioned, challenged, and, at times, wrestled into submission. But they are still evolving because I am still evolving. The woman who wrote the first version of these stories is not exactly the woman revising them now. Thank God, frankly. She was doing her best, but she also made some choices. Many choices. An impressive number of choices.
And yet, I publish them anyway.
Not because they are perfect.
Because I need them to be done enough.
There is a particular madness in trying to finish a life story while still actively living the life. The ending keeps moving. The meaning keeps shifting. Every time I think I understand the lesson, another layer presents itself like, “Actually, ma’am, you missed the point entirely.” Rude, but often accurate.
Still, I have learned that if I wait until the books feel finished in some absolute, eternal, museum-quality way, they may remain trapped on my hard drive forever. And while there is a small dramatic part of me that enjoys imagining someone discovering my unpublished manuscripts after my death, I am also practical enough to know that no one wants that job. My family has suffered enough.
So I publish them because I want the box checked.
Done enough.
Shared enough.
Alive enough.
If I die tomorrow, I want to know these stories made it out of me. I want to know they did not spend the rest of my life sitting in an unfinished state, waiting for me to become less afraid, less perfectionistic, less embarrassed by my own humanity.
Because the truth is, I needed these stories when I wrote them.
I needed to read about a woman who could be smart and reckless, loving and selfish, strong and humiliatingly fragile. I needed to see someone try to change her life without knowing whether she was saving herself or setting everything on fire. I needed a story that did not flatten love into virtue or betrayal into villainy. I needed the ugly middle. The contradictory middle. The part where clarity arrives late and usually wearing muddy shoes.
And if I needed that, maybe someone else does too.
Maybe someone else needs permission to examine the story honestly, even if honesty does not make her look particularly noble.
Maybe someone else is sitting inside a life that looks functional from the outside but feels spiritually airless from within.
Maybe someone else has mistaken endurance for goodness.
Maybe someone else has built a beautiful life and still wonders why she feels haunted.
That is what these books are, at least to me.
They are not instructions.
They are not confessions wrapped in a moral lesson.
They are not a polished little redemption package tied with ribbon and marketed toward women who enjoy beach reads and emotional devastation in equal measure—although, honestly, bless that genre.
They are an offering.
A flawed one. A human one.
They are proof that I was here, that I lived through certain things, that I tried to understand them, that I kept returning to the page even when the page was a mirror I deeply resented.
Writing these books has been a terribly long journey. A ridiculous journey. A “why did I think this was a good idea?” journey. But it has also been one of the most meaningful things I have ever done.
So here they are.
Still imperfect.
Still evolving.
Still mine.
Done enough to let go.
And maybe, somehow, useful enough to share.
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