Blog Archives
Hard Things
Hard Things is Marc Hopkins’s memoir of training for and running the Bigfoot 200, a brutal 206.5-mile endurance race through the Cascade Mountains, but the race itself is really only the outer trail. The deeper journey is inward, through old grief, heart trouble, divorce, fatherhood, family silence, anxiety, love, and the aching need to prove oneself worthy. Hopkins moves from a sweltering training run where he’s reduced to counting steps, through snow-blocked roads, river crossings, a folded shoe insert he refuses to fix, and finally into the long, delirious miles of the race, where aid stations, pacers, his son, his mother, and Jenni become part of a hard-won lesson: strength isn’t the same as pretending not to need anyone.
What I admired most is how honestly the book lets discomfort stay uncomfortable. Hopkins doesn’t polish himself into some heroic endurance-machine version of a person. He gives us the man who drives himself to the hospital with heart symptoms, jokes through a 99 percent blockage, signs up for a 200-mile race partly as a defiant gesture against death, and then slowly realizes that his compulsive toughness has a shadow side. The “rock in the shoe” moment stayed with me because it’s so simple and so revealing. He’s literally hurting because his insole is folded under his foot, yet he keeps going because that’s what he’s trained himself to do emotionally, too. That’s the book at its best: physical pain becoming a quiet little door into something larger.
The writing has a loose, conversational immediacy that fits the subject well. Hopkins is funny in a self-deprecating way, especially when he lets the absurdity of ultrarunning breathe, like searching for a hidden trail that seems to have vanished into a river, or mistaking a stump for Bigfoot when sleep deprivation starts playing tricks on him. At times, the book circles familiar emotional territory, especially around worthiness and the need to appear strong, but I found that repetition mostly honest rather than tedious. Long races don’t reveal things neatly. They return the same fears again and again, under different weather, with worse feet. The best passages have a rugged sensory clarity: the blast zones, the old-growth forest, the stale exhaustion of aid stations, the strange anticlimax after the finish.
By the end, what moved me wasn’t simply that Hopkins finishes Bigfoot 200, though that achievement is staggering. It’s that he finishes with a softer understanding of himself, and that softness feels more courageous than the miles. Hard Things is a thoughtful, bruised, humane book about endurance, not as conquest, but as a way of listening to the life you’ve been trying to outrun. I’d recommend it to runners and endurance athletes, certainly, but also to anyone who has confused self-reliance with healing, or who needs a reminder that doing hard things doesn’t require becoming unbreakable.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0GYQL3KG8
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia is a lyrical work of poeticized nonfiction about a son watching his mother vanish into dementia while trying to preserve the woman she was: devout, wounded, resilient, flawed, and beautiful. Theodore McDowell structures the book first around his mother’s decline and death, then widens the lens into a collage of dementia as experienced by patients, spouses, family members, and caretakers. The result is less a conventional memoir than a sequence of elegies, prayers, memories, and reckonings, all circling the same terrible truth: love does not prevent loss, but it can bear witness to it.
What moved me most was the book’s refusal to make dementia neat. McDowell does not soften the disease into a sentimental lesson. He shows its bewilderment, its humiliations, its repeated thefts of language, identity, and family roles. Yet the writing keeps searching for grace in the wreckage. A mother becomes stained glass, a garden becomes consecrated ground, a jazz trio briefly restores old romance to dull eyes. These images could have felt ornate, but at their best, they act like small lamps in a dark ward, illuminating what clinical language cannot reach.
I also appreciated the emotional candor beneath the beauty. This is not simply a son praising his mother; it is a son sorting through devotion, anger, religious inheritance, family violence, forgiveness, and guilt. That complexity gives the book its pulse. At times, the intensity of the imagery is almost overwhelming, but that excess feels tied to the subject itself. Grief is not tidy prose. Dementia breaks continuity, and McDowell answers with fragments that shimmer, bruise, and repeat like memory trying to repair itself.
The target audience for this book includes readers of memoirs, grief literature, dementia narratives, caregiving books, poetry, spiritual memoirs, family trauma, and literary elegies. Readers who admire Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking may recognize a similar attempt to make art out of bereavement, though McDowell’s voice is more prayerful, more image-soaked, and more overtly devotional. Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia is a sorrowful, luminous book that turns memory into a chapel for the vanishing.
Pages: 239 | ASIN : B0GFB3Z3L6
Why You Felt Crazy
Why You Felt Crazy is a compassionate and steady-handed guide to understanding gaslighting, trauma bonding, leaving an emotionally unsafe relationship, and learning how to live inside your own mind again afterward. Author Quinn Morgan writes from the middle of the experience rather than from some polished, faraway place of total recovery, and that choice gives the book its pulse. The book moves from the first quiet signs of self-erasure, like softening a simple “Where are you?” into something safer, toward the brutal confusion of leaving, going back, wanting to go back, and eventually rebuilding self-trust one small, almost tender decision at a time.
What I appreciated most was how deeply the book delves into the emotional weather of abuse without flattening it into slogans. Morgan doesn’t pretend that leaving is clean or that clarity stays lit once it arrives. The scene at her sister’s house, when a harmless request to make cookies triggers panic about mess, scrutiny, and being watched, stayed with me because it captures something many books only describe clinically. The harm has followed her into safety. It’s in the body, in the reflex to explain, in the way ordinary life suddenly feels booby-trapped. I found that devastating, but also strangely relieving. The book gives language to experiences that are often too slippery to hold, especially the ache of missing someone you know hurt you. Morgan’s insistence that grief isn’t proof you made the wrong choice feels emotionally precise and hard-won.
The writing is intimate and rhythmic. Morgan has a gift for returning to a phrase until it feels less like repetition and more like a hand on your shoulder. At its best, the prose is luminous in a quiet way, especially when she writes about the nervous system seeking closeness from the very person who creates the fear, or about safety feeling unfamiliar before it feels peaceful. The structure can feel soothing in its pattern, with each chapter turning toward reassurance in a similar cadence. This isn’t a book trying to impress the reader with complexity. It’s trying to keep someone company at 2 a.m., when logic has gone thin, and the urge to go back feels enormous. As a result, its repetition often feels intentional.
I came away feeling that the book’s strongest idea is also its most humane one: people don’t stay because they’re foolish. They stay because the good moments were real, because the beginning mattered, and because the cycle trains the body to confuse relief with love. That framing is powerful, and Morgan handles it with care. The practical sections on safety planning, the day of leaving, and the first thirty days are grounded without turning cold, while the later chapters on self-trust and learning what safe feels like give the book a softer landing. Why You Felt Crazy is tender, clear, and painfully recognizable in the best sense. I’d recommend it to readers who are questioning an emotionally manipulative relationship, recovering from one, or trying to understand why someone they love can’t simply walk away.
Pages: 170 | ASIN : B0GGYFWCJD
Grandfather and Grandson
The Corridor follows a grandfather with vast knowledge of the Blue Ridge Mountains who sets out on a mission alongside his teenage grandson to document a wildlife corridor threatened by a resort development. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I really wanted to do a reverse mentorship piece. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I see all the time grandfathers showing grandchildren the nature that surrounds us here. I thought it would be fun to explore a different type of relationship. One where Ellias, the grandson, takes exception to Richard, the grandfather’s, lack of motivation on saving the wildlife corridor, even when he has economic reasons, property values, and the knowledge to save it. This shift happens not only in Ellias’ familiarity with social media and technology but also in motivating Richard to do something. This is a wonderful dynamic between grandfather and grandson.
Richard’s emotional arc is so understated but powerful. How did you approach writing a character whose growth happens through small shifts rather than dramatic revelations?
That is something I like to present while writing. I think it’s important for writers to engage their readers by not presenting the obvious but to deliver it in such a way that it’s believable, and hopefully they understand this the way you did.
Nature writing can sometimes overpower character, but here, landscape and psychology feel inseparable. How did you balance the two?
That’s a great question. And the answer is that I see daily the subtle balance between people and nature. I see a family of black bears crossing the street, and people stop their cars, being very respectful to let them pass. Pulling their phones out recording the encounter. It truly is magical, and while writing, I can’t help but bring that perspective. And I’m happy that you noticed.
If Richard and Eli met again ten years later, what do you think each would have taught the other by then?
Ah, you are skipping ahead. The Corridor is the first book in a 6-book (novelette) series…stay tuned.
Debt
Wade Parrish’s Debt is a bleak and funny literary novel about Bill and Kaelyn, two overworked New York lawyers whose love is being slowly crushed by student loans, corporate law, family damage, class panic, and the constant arithmetic of survival. The story begins after one of Bill’s colleagues dies by suicide, a death that becomes less an isolated tragedy than a warning flare from the life Bill and K are already living. From there, the novel follows their engagement, their work in the machinery of private equity, their fraying tenderness, and the increasingly grotesque bargains they make to escape the Debt that has come to define them.
I really enjoyed the voice. It’s frantic, hilarious, disgusted, and weirdly exact. Parrish writes corporate language as if it were a parasitic fungus growing over the soul, turning ordinary grief into defined terms and moral collapse into cleanly formatted clauses. I found the book exhausting in all the right ways. It does not merely describe burnout; it reproduces the claustrophobia of it, the way every email, subway platform, family call, and wedding expense becomes another small creditor tapping on the glass.
I also admired how the novel refuses to let Bill and K become simple victims. They are trapped, but they are also vain, cruel, evasive, funny, loving, cowardly, and sometimes monstrous. That complexity gives the book its serrated power. The satire is brutal, but the romance underneath it is not fake. Their love feels like two people clinging to each other in a flooding basement, aware that they may be holding one another under as much as keeping one another alive.
I recommend Debt to readers of dark comedy, corporate and class satire, legal fiction, and psychological drama, especially those drawn to books about ambition, money, burnout, and moral compromise. Readers who enjoy the corrosive social intelligence of Bret Easton Ellis or the workplace despair of Joshua Ferris may find a harsher, more legally intoxicated cousin here. Debt is a love story written in red ink, and every page knows exactly what survival costs.
Pages: 166
Boost Mental Health
Healthy Relationships presents a thoughtful and approachable exploration of what helps relationships thrive, walking readers through the core ingredients of healthy connection, communication, boundaries, empathy, responsibility, and self-awareness. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Mental health is an important subject for me especially because I work as an inpatient psychiatric nurse. We all could use more help with our journey to stable mental well-being, including myself. I learn things from every Nurse Dorothea® book I write. We plan to produce about 80 Nurse Dorothea® books (currently there are 15 as of April 2026), so it was time to cover this topic.
Relationships are complex, and I appreciate that you covered friendships, family ties, romantic partnerships, and online relationships. How did you approach writing about such a diverse topic, but still presenting meaningful information without being overwhelming?
I practice the skill of synthesis of reading a lot of research-based information and combining it all to create a thorough product. The Nurse Dorothea® books are much harder for me to write than the Nurse Florence® series since I am combining information from many different source documents.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
There were many, but one important one discussed by Harvard Health was how a variety of relationships can help boost mental health.
What is the next book in the Nurse Dorothea series that you are working on?
One of the next books to be published is Schizophrenia. We need to play our part to destigmatize mental illness just as Dorothea Dix did in the 1800s.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
If society wants something we have never had, we’re going to have to do something that has never been done.
The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust
Michael Oana’s The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust is a book about replacing transaction with relationship. Its argument is plain but surprisingly elastic: advisors grow not chiefly by proving they’re clever with money, but by becoming memorable, reassuring, and human in the lives of their clients. Oana builds that case through a stream of stories and operating principles, moving from the broad claim that “you don’t sell money, you sell clarity” into a hands-on system of client events, follow-up rhythms, branded touchpoints like his “Toucan 180° Review,” and practical recovery plans for when things go sideways. The book keeps circling one conviction with real persistence: people remember how you made them feel, and that feeling, if tended well, becomes trust, loyalty, referrals, and eventually business.
This is a field manual written by someone who’s spent decades watching rooms, moods, timing, and human nerves. I found that directness refreshing. Oana is best when he’s concrete: the failed Christmas party that drew four people, the rebound chocolate tasting that packed the room, the zoo event that worked because it was thoughtful rather than lavish, the absurdly specific and oddly charming “529 College Night” with its 5:29 timing and ramen bar. Those examples give the book texture. They also save it from the bloodless professionalism that often drains books in this category. The book’s central insight arrives early and then echoes, in slightly different keys, for much of the read. Because the voice is earnest and the examples are authentic, I found myself staying with it.
I think Oana is absolutely right that trust is built socially and emotionally, not just analytically. His best pages understand that money conversations are freighted with shame, fear, pride, grief, and hope, and that an advisor often functions less like a technician than a guide through vulnerable seasons of life. I was especially struck by the way the book treats follow-up not as admin but as moral evidence. The eclipse event at the ballpark, the golf simulator evening that became meaningful only in the days after, even the movie screening interrupted by a family death all reinforce the same point: the real test is not whether an event sparkles, but whether care continues after the room empties.
The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust is a sincere, useful, and more emotionally intelligent book than its niche premise first suggests. It understands something many business books miss: trust is atmospheric before it is procedural. I wouldn’t recommend it to every reader, but I would recommend it to financial advisors, relationship-driven professionals, and small business owners who want to think more deeply about how care is expressed in practice, not just promised in branding. It’s a practical book with a surprisingly human pulse.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0GGTKC8TX
Be Authentic
In Heart’s Dzyer, you share some of the most intimate aspects of your relationship with your boyfriend via letters exchanged during his time in prison. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This was an important book to write because his family was grieving, and I wanted to give them something about him that they may not have known.
I appreciated the candid nature with which you share your experiences. What was the most difficult thing for you to write about?
Even though I was candid and I wrote about difficult things, I did black out some private things that I didn’t think were appropriate to be shared with everyone.
What advice would you give someone who is considering sharing their own memoir?
I would advise that person to be authentic. I kept his spelling inaccuracies because, as someone with dyslexia, it would have been inauthentic to portray him as a perfect speller.
Did you learn anything about yourself in the course of putting Heart’s Dzyer together?
I don’t know if learning is the first thing that comes to mind. If anything, my experience dredged up a lot of emotions. Some days were harder than others. Sometimes I had to take a break because I needed to process emotions. So I guess I learned that I needed to give myself time to process, and I had to be compassionate toward myself as well.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
