A Unique Memoir with Universal Appeal
Paradise Road tells the first part of my story. Here’s what happened next.
What happens when buried grief rises two decades late, upending the life you’ve built on its coffin? When your old grief seems inappropriate, and your heart wrestles with grief upon grief as you move too many times and lose too many friendships? How do you recover from a devastated marriage, a crushed faith, and an endlessly broken heart?
This is the crux of Marilyn’s crisis. After losing her first great love to cancer, she becomes a Christian, marries Henry, and joins him in a hectic worldwide ministry that leaves little room for personal reflection. When her old grief unexpectedly resurfaces, she’s shocked by the tsunami that rips through their lives. And when intensive counselling fails to bring healing and Henry later pens a letter that decimates their churches and spins them out of fellowship, her battered heart is tested beyond imagining. Exploring delayed and complicated grief in its many disguises– dashed dreams, disenchantment, family troubles, and the guilt of being a former faith leader, now grappling with depression and dismay— Marilyn candidly shares her long journey back to wholeness.
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My award winning debut memoir takes you on a exciting journey of discovery and adventure.
A restless child of the 1960s, Marilyn yearns for love, hippiedom, and escape from her mother’s control. At 14, she runs nearly a thousand miles away to Vancouver, British Columbia, eventually landing herself in a Catholic home for troubled girls. At 16, she’s emancipated, navigating adulthood without a high school diploma, and craving a soulmate. When she falls in love with Jack, the grad student living next door, life finally seems perfect. The two embark on a cross-continental bicycle trip, headed for South America, but before they reach Mexico, tragedy strikes. Utterly shattered, Marilyn does the hardest thing she can imagine: a solo bicycle trip, part tribute, part life test. She conquers her fears but goes wildly off course, chasing her heart as she falls into a series of tragicomic rebounds. Two itinerant years later, a chain of events in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains leads to a peace she never expected to find.
Reminiscent of Wild and Travelling with Ghosts, Marilyn’s journey portrays a life unmoored by grief, brought to shore again. Paradise Road was selected as the International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Book Club’s International Book of the Month for March 2021, and was a winner in three categories of the Book Excellence Awards and the Indie Book Awards.