Some stories arrive as assignments. Others refuse to leave until you write them down.
My books live mostly in the latter category. They move through memoir, fiction, family, survival, identity, and the strange business of figuring out who you are after the part of the story you thought would define you is already over.
Holding the only existing written copy of Something in the Rising.
Photo: Bethany Foley
The books
Broken Love Letters
Published · 2024
Built from letters, notes, poems, essays, and journals written during and after a contentious divorce and custody battle, Broken Love Letters began as an attempt to put language around trauma while it was still being lived.
The first book in a larger memoir series, it is less interested in making the past tidy than in documenting what it looked like from inside it—and what remained once the immediate crisis had passed.
Available in print and ebook.
Something in the Rising
Memoir · Completed
Something in the Rising begins where Broken Love Letters ended: after survival stops being the only thing that matters.
The second book in the memoir series follows the quieter and sometimes stranger work of rebuilding—what happens when crisis recedes, ordinary life returns, and the question is no longer simply how to survive what happened, but what to do with the life that remains.
It is a book about recovery without pretending recovery is linear, about identity after upheaval, and about learning that a life does not have to be dramatic to be meaningful.
Perennial Phoenix: The Redactions
Memoir · Completed
Perennial Phoenix: The Redactions widens the story told in Broken Love Letters and Something in the Rising, reaching backward to tell the life that existed before either of them began.
The third book in the memoir series moves through the Marine Corps, marriage and motherhood, moves across the country, work and journalism, relationships, family, loss, investigations, courtrooms, separation, and the eventual move to Virginia. Along the way, the story that seemed to begin with a marriage ending becomes something much larger: a life repeatedly recorded by institutions, documents, other people—and eventually by the person who actually lived it.
At its center is a question of authorship. Who gets to create the official version of a life? What happens when the record and the lived experience do not quite agree? And what remains when the redactions are finally removed?
Perennial Phoenix is the larger story behind the first two books—and the point at which the person who spent years appearing in everyone else’s version of events takes possession of the record herself.
Whoever Came Next
Memoir · Work in Progress
Whoever Came Next begins the day after Perennial Phoenix ends—and in a place the previous books never really had the luxury of occupying: ordinary life.
There is no singular crisis organizing the story this time. Life has become less bombs and more laughter, leaving room for different questions about purpose, identity, relationships, family, work, and what comes after the story you thought you were telling is finished.
The fourth book in the memoir series is currently being written. What it becomes from here is, rather deliberately, still an open question.
thekatiebjones 