The Only Way Through Is Out
About the memoir

When a single editorial comment opens an empty-nester’s eyes to the truth about her feelings for her best friend, Suzette must choose between maintaining her thirty-year “perfect” marriage and life of heterosexual privilege or leaning into the unspeakable feelings rising within her and throwing a bomb into her family’s ecosystem. Will she put aside decades of denial, a lifetime of playing it safe, and the critical voices inside and outside her all for a chance to feel fully alive?

The Only Way Through Is Out is a story that speaks to women at midlife and LGBTQ+ folx who are hiding in metaphorical closets, longing to live out loud but afraid of the cost. Weaving the past and present through a fractured, nonlinear story structure, this memoir is about gender roles and sexuality, faith and spirituality, identity and motherhood, head knowledge and body wisdom, but ultimately it is about reclamation of self, at any age.

The Only Way Through Is Out, forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press Winter 2024!