I Almost Didn't Write This Book. Here's Why I Did Anyway.

There is a version of this story that never gets told. The one you keep folded up so small it fits inside a place no one can reach. The one you have rehearsed in the shower a hundred times, cried through alone in your car, and then buried again, because the cost of saying it out loud felt too high.

For a long time, I lived in that version. The silent one.

This memoir — Diary of a Mad White Woman — is the other version. The real one. And writing it was the hardest thing I have ever done. Harder than leaving. Harder than the courtroom. Harder, even, than cancer.

The Moment I Knew I Had to Write It

There was not one single moment. There were hundreds of small ones — moments where I thought, someone should say this out loud. Moments where I sat across from other women and watched them describe my life using their words, their marriages, their mothers, their silence. Moments where the thing I needed most — proof that I was not crazy, that I was not imagining it, that what happened to me had a name — did not exist in the form I needed it.

I had read the books. I had underlined the passages. I had dog-eared the pages where someone else came close. But close is not the same thing as there.

So I wrote the book I needed. And it cost me more than I expected.

What It Cost to Tell the Truth

The truth, when you have spent decades burying it, does not come out clean. It comes out in pieces. In 3 a.m. writing sessions where you are shaking before you even start typing. In chapters you delete and rewrite six times because some part of you is still protecting the person who hurt you. In the moment you finally write the sentence you have been circling for months and realize: I have been afraid of my own story.

"She buried a version of herself and learned how to live again." That line is in this book. It is also the truest thing I know about myself.

There is a poem called "I buried her today" that lives at the heart of this memoir. It is about the woman I was before I understood what was being done to me. Before I could name the covert abuse. Before I knew that silence, over time, becomes its own kind of violence. Writing that poem did not feel like creation. It felt like an exhumation.

Why the Title Says What It Says

People ask about the title. Some people flinch at it. Some people laugh — the uncomfortable kind of laugh that means I understand exactly what you mean.

I chose it because I spent years being told I was the problem. That I was dramatic. Hysterical. Unreasonable. Mad. And I want every woman who picks up this book and has ever been handed that same verdict to feel the word reclaimed before she even opens the first page.

"You're not mad. You're waking up."

What This Book Is

Diary of a Mad White Woman is a survival memoir. It is five books in one: The Poison. The Mirror. The Cancer Years. The Resurrection. The Voice. It moves through decades — through a marriage that nearly destroyed me, through a courtroom that cost me more than I can put into a single sentence, through a breast cancer diagnosis that arrived in the middle of everything else and somehow became part of the reckoning.

"It was the beginning, though I thought it was the end — a raw, unflinching memoir about escaping violence, surviving cancer, and reclaiming a voice that was buried for decades." That is the sentence. That is the whole book in miniature.

I did not write this to perform recovery. I wrote it because recovery is real and it is also messy and funny and devastating and not linear and nobody was being honest about that. I wrote it because I have a voice and for a long time I did not know that was something I was allowed to use.

Who This Is For

This book is coming. July 10, 2026.

It is for the woman who has been told she is too much and not enough at the same time. For the woman who has read every self-help book and still does not recognize what happened to her as abuse. For the woman who is still in it, wondering if what she is experiencing is real. For the woman who got out and is still trying to understand what she survived.

It is for anyone who has ever buried a piece of themselves to keep the peace — and is ready, finally, to go back and find her.

The stories we bury. The voices we find.