My Story

Hello and welcome to my page! A little bit about me… Born in 1979 I grew up in Hannibal and later St. Louis, Missouri. I was born in a family that was entrenched within the military and from a young age I felt confronted by the realities and motivations of war. It triggered within me a lifelong study of history and human nature.  

 

With a childhood full of contradictions, devoted grandparents but disinterested parents, I ended up living on my own from the age of 15. For the following 7 years I survived as best as I could, searching for a person or place I could call home. When I was 17 I vowed that one day I would build a stable life and write a book to share my story and contribute to the great human library that I loved so much. With the advent of the internet in the year 2000 I became email pen pals with several people from all over the world. One of them was a gorgeous Englishman named Matthew, who I fell in love with and moved to England to marry in 2001. We were blessed with our son, Alex in 2006. In 2018 I found my Jewish paternal family and in 2021 Matthew, Alex and I formally converted to Judaism with Rabbi Heather Miller of Keeping It Sacred.

 

In 2010 I suffered a debilitating brain bleed and my health spiralled downwards. Also in 2010 I decided it was time that I started to write professionally. Despite juggling motherhood and my ever changing disability I was determined to fulfil the vow I’d made as a teenager. I began to write as a freelance journalist and work on my first book “The Lemay Leveller” published to great reviews in 2015. Many people loved "The Lemay Leveller” and I certainly needed to write it, but I remained unhappy with my book. I knew I had rushed the process because I was afraid of my own mortality beating me to the finish line. 

 

For this reason, I withdrew the publishing rights to “The Lemay Leveller” in 2018 and started my book over from scratch. Ironically, the process of writing, publishing and un-publishing “The Lemay Leveller” was the essential experience I needed to be able to write the book I had always wanted. "Samizdat: A Love Letter” is now in its final stages of editing and will be published in 2025.  

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