In writing She’s So Brave, I hoped the book would resonate with miracle kids of childhood illness who wrestle with their survivorship identity and grow up to be complicated adults.

About She’s So Brave

American culture celebrates childhood illness survivors as little warriors and applauds them for breathing, however, the story doesn’t end after being declared cured. 

She’s So Brave is a reflective and humorous memoir spanning my life, starting as a childhood leukemia survivor who leveraged the life-threatening illness to gain fame in a local religious farming community outside of Nashville. This collection combines humor and heart through observations on mortality, survivor's guilt, motherhood, identity, belonging, and emotional truths and resembles memoirs by Michelle Zauner and Jenny Lawson. 

So every day, I resolved to bury my history deeper as I dedicated the majority of my existence to being the voice for all blood cancer patients seeking access to quality, affordable, coordinated care. I would speak for them, I would plead on behalf of researchers, families, and patients, but not for myself. Looking back, my urge to withhold my medical history was survivor’s guilt. After all, my job existed because others didn’t survive.

With cancer came attention, so at the young age of 8, the development of my identity became intertwined with being “special.” The book begins with the irony of this phenomenon, which is meant to amuse and move a reader. But what goes up must come down. I still had to go through the same anxieties of my teenage years as everyone else, especially after I was deemed cured of the disease. So like any teenager, I had a bout of dangerous, rebellious behavior that seems (and might be) astoundingly reckless for a survivor. From there, She’s So Brave traces how I became a regular citizen in life without the badge of survivor, but always ignoring or negotiating my identity as one. Similarly, as I am more than my medical history, the book honors that as I navigate my roots, career, marriage, motherhood, and returning home to the community where I tasted fame.

This book is a fresh, unconventional perspective on a conventional topic. There are dozens of cancer survivor stories, but none that explore the journey of a childhood survivor leveraging illness for affection and employment, self-sabotaging, and returning to the place of origin to reconcile emotional truths.  My hope is that She’s So Brave will make a difference by uniting childhood cancer survivors and building a community for the over 10 million parents of children with chronic illnesses.

I’m currently seeking representation for FAME.

Excerpts from She’s So Brave

 

“We were guinea pigs. The pincushions of our generation. For the leukemia kids, we were the new wave of survivors. We were the lucky ones.”

 

“Drugs and pain, I knew. In the absence of them, I felt uneasy. My body had been pushed to the brink with cancer treatment and pushing it to the hazy edge of oblivion felt as natural to me as stretching your legs. In the decomposing darkness, I could dwell with my kinfolk.”

“Every day counted because the next one wasn’t guaranteed. And because of this, we danced with our eyes closed, made friends fast, howled and laughed at the moon like lunatics, and wept in each other's arms. And it was okay. You didn’t have to fight that day. Or the next. Or the next. You could be a kid living life as if you had never faced your death already. As if you could forget that life was fragile, a lesson none of us could delay.” 

 

“Before, pain represented a precursor for death. Instead of fighting for my existence this time, pain was the conduit for new life, for my son, and for me.”