Blog Archives
Syrup Sandwiches: Choose Not to Give Up!
Syrup Sandwiches: Choose Not to Give Up! is Anthony Owens’s personal memoir about growing up poor, fatherless, and often frightened in Brooklyn, then slowly, stubbornly building a life that refuses to be defined by neglect, violence, hunger, or bad examples. The book moves from childhood scenes on the fire escape with his brother James, melting Now and Later candies on the radiator, to the shock of witnessing the deadly robbery at Ruiz Deli, to long Sundays in church, bullying, early work, Navy life, fatherhood, foster parenting, and the painful work of becoming the kind of man he never really had in front of him.
What stayed with me most was the tenderness under the toughness. Owens doesn’t write about poverty as an abstract condition. He writes it through empty cabinets, Salvation Army church clothes, syrup sandwiches, tired prayers, and a mother who gives her last money to the church because faith is sometimes the only structure left standing. I found myself especially moved by the small scenes that could’ve been treated as minor but aren’t: Sister Edwards teaching him how to tie a real tie, his brother looking to him for courage, the boys realizing that the bodega no longer feels safe after Mr. Ruiz and Mateo are killed. Those moments feel bruised and intimate. They made me think about how childhood can harden a person, but also how a single act of steadiness can become a lantern someone carries for decades.
The prose can be direct, sometimes almost blunt, but it has the rhythm of someone finally telling the whole truth without decorating it too much. The ideas are stated plainly, especially around perseverance and refusing a victim mindset, but the lived evidence behind those ideas gives them weight. Owens’s best pages are the ones where memory does the arguing for him: the Navy recruiter promising “three hots and a cot,” the complicated search for his father, the ache of wanting to be a better husband and father than the men he saw growing up. I believed the lesson because I believed the life.
By the end, I felt the book was less about triumph than repair. It’s about a man looking back at hunger, fear, racism, violence, faith, shame, work, and family, then saying, with hard-earned calm, that none of it gets the final word. The concluding feeling is warm but not sentimental, hopeful but not naive. I’d recommend Syrup Sandwiches to readers who appreciate memoirs about resilience, Black boyhood, family cycles, faith, trauma, and the long, imperfect labor of becoming better than what hurt you.
Pages: 253 | ASIN: B0BF46F89R
Hydrangeas from Dad: His Gift from Beyond that Rescued My Soul – Healing and Thriving After the Loss of a Loved One
Hydrangeas from Dad is a memoir and spiritual reflection about Mary Ellen Connett MacDonald’s loss of her father, Bill Pukatch, and the extraordinary message she believes he sent her after his death: a text from his phone containing a photo of blue hydrangeas. The book begins in the raw terror of “the dreaded call,” moves through the family’s tender hospice vigil, the memorial service, and the author’s stunned encounter with the mysterious hydrangea text, then opens into a wider meditation on soul, afterlife, courage, shamanism, family legacy, her mother’s later death, wild horses, and the practices that helped her live with more truth and spirit.
I found the strongest parts of the book to be the scenes grounded in ordinary human detail. The barbecue dinner interrupted by the phone call, the long night drive, her father gripping her hand in the hospital, the family singing and sleeping in his room, Paul asking to hug the urn one last time: these moments have a plainspoken ache. The writing is at its best when it trusts those images. I could feel the strange intimacy of waiting beside a dying parent, the way time becomes thick and sacred, the way everyone in a family suddenly becomes both child and adult. The hydrangea text is the book’s central mystery, but what moved me more deeply was the emotional weather around it: guilt over missed calls, the stunned silence after death, the hunger for one more sign that love hasn’t vanished.
I also admired the book’s courage, even when I didn’t always feel equally persuaded by every idea. MacDonald writes with complete conviction about the immortality of the soul, continued communication after death, guardian angels, spirit guides, drumming, and shamanic practice. Readers who share or are open to those beliefs may find the book deeply consoling. I appreciated that the book doesn’t treat grief as something to be tidied away. It treats grief as a threshold, a fierce and unwieldy teacher. The later sections on soul nourishment, wild horses, Rocket the mustang, and creative self-claiming broaden the memoir beyond bereavement into a portrait of a woman deciding, after loss, not to live half-hidden anymore.
Hydrangeas from Dad is heartfelt, vulnerable, and spiritually unapologetic. It’s a book less interested in proving its mysteries than in showing how one woman was changed by them. Its language can be tender, emphatic, and sometimes overflowing, but that fullness feels connected to the book’s central pulse: love keeps speaking, even after the body is gone. I’d recommend it especially to readers grieving a parent, anyone drawn to after-death communication and soulful healing, and people who want a companionable, emotionally generous book about turning loss into a more honest life.
Pages: 156 | ASIN: B0G3NNM4W3
Bronx Attitude
Bronx Attitude is Rossana Rosado’s memoir of becoming herself: a Bronx-born Puerto Rican girl raised among stairwells, bodegas, bilingual family music, formidable women, stern patriarchs, and the warm chaos of Wheeler Avenue, who grows into a journalist, publisher, public servant, and keeper of communal memory. The book moves from childhood scenes, like her grandmother teaching her to read El Diario in Spanish, to the electric public history of Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, to Rosado’s years at El Diario, where journalism becomes both vocation and inheritance. It’s really a story about “we”: family, Latinos, women, neighborhoods, ancestors, and the complicated blessing of belonging.
The early chapters have a gorgeous lived-in texture: the garbage cans clanging on the curb, WADO playing through a neighbor’s window, Papá bringing coffee to Mamá, the child sneaking upstairs for toast and discovering that the newspaper isn’t broken, it’s in Spanish. Those moments feel tender. I also loved how she writes women into the center of the world, not as saints exactly, but as forces. Mamá with her private money, Lucía dancing with children in the rain, Rosa calling everything “divine” despite the quiet cruelties around her. Rosado’s sentences can be plainspoken, almost conversational, and then suddenly they gleam. The memoir has that Bronx rhythm: affectionate, blunt, funny, wounded, proud.
The book insists that personal history and public history are braided together. Rosado doesn’t treat Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination as a distant news event. She makes it feel like a family room, a newsroom, a collective exhale, with champagne glasses, red nail polish, and the startling realization that one woman’s ascent could lift a whole community’s posture. The chapters on El Diario carry a different ache. When she writes about Manuel de Dios’s murder, or about inheriting leadership after Carlos Ramirez’s death, the memoir becomes more than remembrance. It becomes an argument for ethnic media, for courage, for telling the stories mainstream institutions overlook. I didn’t always feel the book was equally tight from chapter to chapter, but even that looseness has a kind of honesty. It reads like someone making room at the table for everyone who shaped her.
I felt like Bronx Attitude had earned its title: not attitude as swagger alone, but as stance, memory, defiance, and love. Rosado’s final reflections on leaving El Diario and looking back at her younger self gave the book a soft, satisfying ache, especially because the memoir never pretends success is clean or solitary. It’s carried by the dead, the elders, the cousins, the mentors, the city, the language, the food, the paper, the block. I’d recommend this to readers who like reflective memoirs about identity, journalism, Latina leadership, New York City, and the emotional architecture of family. It’s a good book for anyone who knows that where you come from doesn’t just explain you, it keeps speaking through you.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0GS98TMGQ
Love is a Lifetime Commitment
In And It Only Took 100 Years…, you share the trials of your youth, your career in show business, and your enduring love story that has defied all odds. What made you decide to share your story with readers?
Seventeen years ago, our friend Joan Rivers gave a dinner party at her house near ours in Connecticut to celebrate New Year’s. She insisted that we go around the table and each person had to say what they were thankful for. She began by saying she was thankful that her daughter and grandchild were well and happy; a guest from England, who owned a huge farm, was thankful for a splendid harvest; a young man said he was thankful for a puppy he had been given for Christmas. Then it came to me, and I said, “I am thankful that Norman and I have been together for 50 years.” Although we lived openly together, I had never alluded to how long our relationship had lasted in such a public way, and there was a moment of shock and then congratulations. Afterward, the boy who’d talked about the dog came over to me. “I’ve been with the man who is my husband for fifteen years, but you two are an amazing example of what I hope we can become. You really have changed my life.” On the way home, I reminded Norman of the articles we had been reading about young gays committing suicide because they felt there was no future in being gay. “If we are an example, maybe we have the responsibility to tell people how wonderful our life can be….” We wrote a book called “Double Life” about our relationship that is still read today. And recently, I decided to tell my story from age 15 to 100 to show how life has changed for me, from World War II to the present day, as well as for the world I lived in. I hope people suffering from doubts about long-lasting love can take heart from my story and know that it is possible.
You write about figures like Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, and Barbra Streisand without losing your own narrative center. How did you balance telling your story without being overshadowed by theirs?
From the time I was a young actor, I was involved with celebrities in some way. I acted with Maurice Evans, who was a huge star in his time. So was Katherine Cornell when I was in her company of “Antony and Cleopatra”. They were part of my life as I worked with them eight times a week. Of course, they were stars and not my buddies, and they were my bosses, but still, they were part of my everyday life. Helen Hayes became a friend when I wrote “The Snoop Sisters” for television. She and Katharine Hepburn were down-to-earth people with decided tastes and enormous talent. Streisand, I watched grow from a plain young girl to a huge screen star. I worked with young actors like Charleston Heston and Tony Randall before they became stars, and when I turned to casting, actors like Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, I came into contact with them before they were stars. My book is not about their lives unless they affect mine in some way. I was in on the beginning of Streisand’s life, but it was part of my development, not only hers. Helen Hayes sent for me from Hollywood, and it affected my life more than hers. My book is my story, and certainly Marlon Brando played a role, but as a supporting player in my story of leaving the New School and taking a small part in the War. But finally, I wrote about what I know – my own life, not the star’s, unless it affected me in some important way.
Your relationship with Norman feels like the emotional anchor of the book. What did you learn about love that you couldn’t have understood earlier in life?
I learned that love is a lifetime commitment. It becomes your family, your friends, your mornings, your evenings, your health, and your sickness. Norman and I married when the law allowed us to, but many years after we had been together. We didn’t need the emotional security, but we did it mainly to join the gay movement into the mainstream. But as I heard the word “commitment” from the woman who married us, I began to cry. I think the realization was dawning on me that she was talking about LIFE, not just being together for passion, attractiveness, fun, and games. This was for life, swearing under the stars and the heavens, but also forever, eternity. That had not been part of the thoughts in my head when I first saw Norman, but they were now what I knew was the truth.
If you could speak to that young boy looking through shop windows, what would you tell him?
I would tell my young self to have courage, be brave, and not be with people who put you down, even if they are your own family. Follow your dream, but remember that sometimes fate will help you along the way. You have to work your ass off all the time – it is never easy. And if you ever get to the point where what you have worked so hard for is not going to work out for you, don’t be afraid to stop and try something else. It’s better than being always disappointed or chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Never forget that life is love as well as work. Most importantly, God, whoever that is, is there to help you. You are not alone.
Author Links: Instagram | Facebook | X | Website
Yet the real story unfolds far from the lights of Broadway or Hollywood. It’s found in his six-decades-long partnership with artist Norman Sunshine, a love story that endured secrecy, prejudice, and time itself. Together they created a shared life filled with beauty, humor, and devotion, proving that the most extraordinary thing of all is the quiet miracle of lasting love.
Only about 0.03% of Americans ever reach 100, and fewer still arrive there with such grace, insight, and gratitude. Reflective, wise, and deeply human, AND IT ONLY TOOK 100 YEARS… is a celebration of work, love, and the mysterious force that binds them-the hard-won truth that, in the end, a full life is its own masterpiece.
Asking For Help Is Not Weakness
Travis Heights follows your journey from a violent 1970s Austin childhood to military service, career survival, and a fraught final reckoning with the father whose love and harm shaped your life. Why was this an important book for you to write?
For most of my adult life I carried that story alone. After I left home, I “put my feelings in a box in the back of my head.” The Marines taught me to accomplish the mission and move on: you don’t dwell, you don’t complain, you drive on. That worked well enough until it didn’t.
When I called my father near Austin, and he needed help, I had a choice: stay stuck in twenty-five years of distance, or go get him. Writing the book was how I made sense of everything that led to how I got to where I am today. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d find in that box.
Decades of compartmentalized experience don’t just sit quietly forever. They shape how you lead, how you love, and how you show up for the people who need you. And here’s what that taught me: the mission I thought I’d completed — surviving, building a career, moving on — was only half the work. The other half was understanding what I’d carried to get there, and deciding what was worth keeping.
I also kept thinking about the kids who are living what I lived. If one person reads this and decides to ask for help instead of walking out the door alone, it was worth every uncomfortable page.
How did you choose which “rules” to include, and did writing them change how you understood those lessons?
The rules chose themselves. Each one represents an important life lesson for me at that time. I’d be deep in a scene, like leaving home, the library, or hitchhiking, and I’d realize there was something I learned there that I still carry.
Some of them I was proud of. Others I had to sit with because writing them out made me see they were survival strategies that had outlived their usefulness. But I still needed to capture them, examine them.
The Marine Corps gave me a framework for rules and discipline, but it also reinforced the walls I’d built around the harder stuff. Putting the rules on the page forced me to ask whether I’d actually learned what I thought I had. What I found was that some of those rules had been running my life quietly for decades — shaping decisions I thought I was making freely. That’s the thing about survival mode: it works so well you forget you’re still in it.
Was it difficult to write about your father and Beulah with both honesty and complexity?
My father was the hardest. Beulah was easier in a way. The hypocrisy, the racism, and the manipulation were clear-cut, and time had given me enough distance to name them plainly.
My father was different. He could be genuinely warm and funny and present, and then the switch flipped. Writing him meant holding both of those things at once without letting either one cancel the other out. I didn’t want to write a villain. I wanted to write the man I actually knew — which was more unsettling than a villain would have been. Because if he were just a monster, I could have put him down and walked away clean.
The harder truth is that I loved him, and that love is what made the distance of twenty-five years hurt as much as anything he ever did. Writing that cost me something. But it’s also the most honest thing in the book. And I think that honesty is what readers feel. The people who’ve reached out to me after reading it don’t say “I hated your father.” They say “I understood him.” That’s the response I was hoping for. Not absolution, not condemnation, but recognition. Because most of us didn’t grow up with monsters. We grew up with complicated people who didn’t always know what to do with us.
What do you hope readers from chaotic or abusive families take away from your story?
That reconciliation doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen. You don’t have to forgive and forget, and you don’t have to stay stuck in the wound either. What I found — slowly, and not without resistance — was that I could tell the truth about what my father did and still choose not to let it define the rest of my life.
That distinction matters, because a lot of people I’ve talked to believe those are the only two options: bury it or be consumed by it. There’s a third way, and it’s harder than either of those, but it’s the one that actually lets you move forward.
I also want readers to know that asking for help is not weakness. I wish I had. If you’re in a situation like the one I grew up in, there are people who will show up for you. Covenant House International exists for exactly that reason, and ten percent of the net profits from this book go to support their work with homeless, runaway, and trafficked kids.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
Then Ray made a choice: he reached out.
It wasn’t the reconciliation either of them expected. No apologies. No pretending. No going back to who they were. Just two men — changed by time, shaped by separate lives — choosing to find each other anyway.
Travis Heights is the story of what happens when healing requires not forgiveness, but transformation.
Some broken things can be repaired, even after twenty-five years. For every family that went quiet. For everyone who wonders whether reaching back is worth the risk.
It is.
It Forced Me To Tell The Truth
The Galloping Snapper is a vivid memoir in which you transform loss, addiction, and restless drift into a life of craft, horsemanship, sobriety, and hard-earned meaning. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book mattered because it forced me to tell the truth about a chapter of my life I could have easily softened or skipped. Losing the pony act wasn’t just a career shift—it was the collapse of an identity I had built my world around. What followed was drift, addiction, and a kind of quiet unraveling. Writing The Galloping Snapper became a way to face that honestly and show how meaning isn’t something you find once—it’s something you rebuild, often from wreckage. I needed to document that transformation, not just for others, but to understand it myself.
How did painting scrollwork and restoring showpieces change the way you understood performance, beauty, and your own identity?
Painting taught me that performance doesn’t end in the ring—it lives in the details people almost overlook. Scrollwork, line, balance, color—those became a different kind of choreography. Instead of movement through space, I was creating movement for the eye. I began to understand beauty as something intentional, something built through discipline and patience, not just flair. That shift grounded me. It took me from being someone who performed identity to someone who crafted it. The work slowed me down, demanded precision, and in doing so, reshaped how I saw myself—not just as an entertainer, but as an artisan.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
I wanted to show that reinvention isn’t glamorous—it’s gritty, uncertain, and often lonely. I wanted to talk about addiction without dressing it up, about loss without rushing to resolution, and about the slow, deliberate process of rebuilding a life with integrity. Another key idea was that creativity can be a lifeline—not just expression, but survival. And underneath all of it, there’s the idea that purpose isn’t handed to you. You earn it through showing up, through doing the work, even when no one is watching.
Bingo feels like more than a horse in the book. How would you describe that partnership in your own words?
Bingo wasn’t just a partner—he was a mirror and a stabilizer. Horses don’t respond to who you pretend to be; they respond to who you actually are in the moment. With Bingo, there was no hiding. If I was scattered, he felt it. If I was grounded, he met me there. That relationship demanded honesty and presence in a way nothing else did at the time. He gave me something steady to build on when everything else felt uncertain. In many ways, he carried me—not just physically, but emotionally—through a period where I was learning how to stand on my own again.
Author’s Linktree: https://linktr.ee/letterfly
Overwhelmed by difficulties, a troubled young circus performer is forced to sell his beloved liberty horses. Although he is consumed with grief, the self-reliant and adventurous Dave recognizes the need to forge a new path and decides to take a chance on his artistic talents. He soon launches his career as an itinerate sign painter, landing among the turbulent world of the traveling carnival. Embracing the benefits of the voyager lifestyle, Dave finds talented tradesmen to mentor his insatiable curiosity and enhance his skillset.
But even his passion for his growing art can’t keep Dave’s heart from yearning for another chance to perform in the spotlight, this time with a classically trained dancing horse. He begins to seek the influential personalities of the classical dressage world to help him develop horsemanship skills and guide his seat, hand, and heart to promote oneness with horses. As his talents grow in both art and horsemanship, he is amazed to discover each of his passions influencing the other—the future looks bright with opportunities aplenty in both fields.
Yet an invisible adversary threatens to interrupt his momentum and take everything away if he can’t admit his problem. Although the evidence is strong, Dave finds himself continually falling prey to old habits with the bottle. Only after another tragedy strikes and a deep depression takes root in his heart does Dave face the facts. But perhaps hitting bottom is the bedrock upon which he can build his new life.
Writing The Last Word
In Losing Mom, you reveal the shifting power dynamic between parent and child as you share the incredibly difficult final years of your mother’s life. Why was this an important book for you to write?
As my mom started aging and our roles reversed, more and more of my time and attention was focused on trying to make the end of her life as vibrant and easy as I could. After she died, the void in my own life was quite big, and writing helped me to fill it. Plus, when we were deep in the throes of her decline at hospice, she said something to me about how she hoped that what she was going through might help other people some day. That stuck with me.
I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?
The hardest part to write about was the last day of her life. It was such a mixture of sadness and relief, finding the right words to describe it took quite a bit of trial and error. The other hard part was writing the last word—it felt as final as if I was losing her all over again.
What is one piece of advice someone gave you that changed your life?
I wish I had the perfect answer to this question and that I actually was given one piece of advice that changed my life! But the only thing that comes to mind (after really giving this some thought!) is my father always telling me to ‘stick to my guns’. I can’t say it was life-changing, but I can often hear his voice in my head when I’m feeling like giving up or giving in.
What do you hope readers are able to take away from your family’s experiences?
My hope is that telling the story of the end of my mom’s life will help make death a little less scary. It’s like the proverbial elephant in the room that we all tiptoe around, and if we could just talk about it more with each other, I feel like we’d all be better off. Also, to hopefully demystify the role hospice and palliative care can play in making someone’s last days the most comfortable that they can be.
