Books & Films
To Be Real
February, 2024
When you are adopted, the urge to know and tell your story can make it hard to focus on the life you have. You can think that once you do know your story, once you do tell your story, you will find yourself, and your real life can finally start. But what happens when you risk everything to share the story of your life, and things don't go as you might have hoped? What happens when you tell your story and your life as you know it falls apart because you didn't have a backup plan?
Maybe you become real.
With the help of fellow adoptees Hannah Andrews, Dawn Conwell Mulkay, Leah E. Cooper, Brad Ewell, Shelley Gaske, Sharon Stein McNamara, Andrew Glynn, Tonni Johnston, Kathleen Shea Kirstein, Elisa Nickerson, Kristen Steinhilber, Kimberly Van Den Hoek and other special guests, To Be Real gives you a many-voiced picture of what happens after you lose your mother when you are very young.
What's with all the rabbits?
I'm so glad you asked! I am convinced the way rabbits hop around and poop without making a big deal of it has a lot to teach us about how to write. Just let it out and keep going. Know what I mean?
Want to hear more? I'll send you my book Making a Mess: Writing and Pooping as a PDF.
Truth and Agency:
Writing Ideas for Adopted People
June, 2022
I wrote this book in case I got hit by a bus. I didn’t want all I’ve learned working with adopted people as a writing coach to disappear.
I have come up with so many writing prompts that I think are helpful and original to my brain, and I was afraid I’d go nuts up in heaven thinking that I should have left some sort of document behind. In other words, I wrote this book so I could relax in the future and so you can write now.
You Don't Look Adopted
July, 2016
Can writing your story save your life?
I should have come with a manual. My parents thought they were getting one thing when they adopted me—a baby of their own—when what they got was a human being with a story of her own.
As a child, I traded safety for silence.
As an adult, I had no idea who I was, why I quit nearly everything I started, why I struggled with things that came more easily to my friends (jobs, relationships, finances, self-esteem), why I seemed hell-bent on throwing myself away.
It got to the point where I didn’t care if telling my story was going to kill me: I was going to find a way to tell it, because living a life that felt like a lie was unbearable.
Sleep No More
SCREENPLAY
Coming soon.
Perfect is Boring: Get Your Head Out of Your Ass
by Kathy Delaney-Smith, Laura Barnard, and Anne Heffron
Coming soon.
I was a co-writer of the (currently in development) leadership book Perfect is Boring: Get Your Head Out of Your Ass by Kathy Delaney-Smith, the winningest coach in Ivy League history.