About Me
I’m a writer, a mother, and someone who tells the truth about the parts of life we’re usually taught to soften, hide, or survive in silence.
My work is shaped by lived experience: addiction, grief, motherhood, recovery, and the long, imperfect process of learning how to stay. I don’t write from hindsight wrapped in a bow. I write from the middle, where the answers are incomplete and the honesty costs something. Whatever clarity shows up here was earned through repetition, relapse, loss, and choosing to keep going anyway.
This memoir was born in the space between breaking and becoming. In the moments that never make it into inspirational quotes or clean redemption arcs. It’s for anyone who has tried to outrun their pain, nearly disappeared, and found themselves still standing. For readers who want truth without performance, hope without denial, and healing that doesn’t require pretending.
Today, my life is quieter and more intentional. I’m raising my children, honoring my past without living in it, and using my voice to make room for conversations that are often avoided because they’re uncomfortable, or too real.
I write for people who don’t need saving.
Only permission to tell the truth.
— Whitney
About the Book
Grief, Grit & the UnPretty Way Home is a raw, literary memoir about survival without sainthood. It traces addiction, grief, motherhood, and identity while refusing the tidy arc of redemption culture.
The book moves through fractured seasons of my life: a childhood shaped by instability and the quiet aftermath of my father’s suicide; adolescence marked by early sexualization, shame, and a constant hunger to be chosen; and adulthood defined by addiction, complicated relationships, and the relentless pull between self-destruction and staying alive for my children.
At its core, this is not a story about hitting rock bottom. It’s about realizing there are many bottoms, and none of them come with a map.
The memoir follows my descent into opioid addiction and survival sex, my first white-knuckle attempt at sobriety, and the brutal honesty of detox and rehab. It holds a friendship that became a lifeline, then a wound, when my best friend, Lin, died suddenly, detonating the fragile progress I had made. Grief didn’t soften my addiction. It sharpened it.
What follows is a series of almosts: almost staying clean, almost believing I deserved help, almost choosing myself. A relapse inside rehab. An overdose I still replay. Being expelled and sent back into the world unready. Moments that should have been endings, but weren’t.
Motherhood runs parallel through every chapter, not as salvation but as tension. I love my children fiercely, Bubby and baby girl, yet I refuse to frame them as my cure. Instead, the book interrogates the unbearable pressure placed on mothers to be redeemed by love alone, and the quieter truth beneath it: sometimes staying is an act of exhaustion, not hope.
As the memoir moves forward, I begin dismantling the myths I once clung to, that empowerment can coexist with self-erasure, that control equals consent, that strength looks like silence. I turn the same sharp lens on myself that I do on the systems that failed me: recovery culture, patriarchy, and the narratives that demand women be either victims or miracles.
The later chapters shift into the present. Sobriety that is lived, not preached. A marriage that is complicated rather than romanticized. Therapy that forces me to confront attachment, desire, and the echoes of addiction that still surface in love. Healing here is nonlinear, unglamorous, and ongoing.
Grief, Grit & the UnPretty Way Home ends not with triumph, but with agency. I don’t claim to be healed, only honest, still standing, and finally unwilling to abandon myself.
This is a memoir for readers who don’t see themselves in polished recovery stories. For women who survived by becoming someone they later had to unlearn. And for anyone who has realized that going home isn’t about where you land, but who you refuse to leave behind.