A MEMOIR

​The world understands a woman who leaves a bad relationship. But when she says, “He was good, he was kind, and I still had to leave,” they falter.

 

And when she says, “The love was abundant. It was like being wrapped in the finest silk,” they do not hear the inference that it was a delicate confinement, a slow suffocation.

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They might wonder if she's too broken to know the value of good love. 

 

She might wonder, too. 

 

Just Say Me begins on the narrator's first day in a picturesque village in the central highlands of Mexico, one day after she leaves Brooklyn and the man she has loved for nearly eleven years. Choking on her own nerve and drowning in the sea of her own courage, ​​she now must face the prospect of surviving her own choices. Her libido–after a decade of sexual incompatibility—has come back online with volcanic force.

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The memoir unfolds over both the best and worst year of her life, one that sees her moving unapologetically through a series of lovers and building from dust a community of women who love her back to herself. These women are intrepid travelers, cosmic artisans, hard-partying sages, dance floor philosophers, and a ragtag band of witches who each month schlep their magic into the desert. They become her guides, and her mirrors, reflecting back to her the medicine she is and possesses. The lovers she meets function in a similar way, fulfilling and then disappointing in a relentless cascade that eddies her back to the truths of her own heart. 

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The narrative unfolds over one year, and throughout, the false dichotomy she’s lived in for years becomes disassembled. She had believed herself to be the bad-worse-difficult one in her relationship, a woman who was lucky—as everyone was keen to tell her—to have had such a "great guy."  But her new friends reflect a different perspective. Seeing herself through their eyes, she slowly comes to understand how he had benefited from this. He had used the blank canvas of her need for him as a screen onto which he could project an image of his own greatness. She’d betrayed him by evolving. 

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Just Say Me uses a distinct and intentional formula. Each chapter is carefully structured to offer a triptych of experience:

 

• The unfolding of taking new lovers: dances of desire, intimacy, power, care and lack of it, pleasure and shame, attachment and isolation.

• The making and deepening of female friendships: this equally vital thread is a stabilizing force through which understanding, care, safety, and humor are explored. 

• Reflecting on the loss: each chapter ultimately circles back—either in brief interludes or more deliberate reflections—to revisit the past, expose new layers of letting go, and follow the unwieldy and unpredictable trajectories of grief and catharsis.

 

Throughout, we get to know the story of a woman of spiritual and relational intensity; the least likely sort of woman to abandon her identity to a man, who comes to realize that’s exactly what she’s done. When she leaves, she becomes a three-legged wolf, bloodied and hobbling, but free. She also becomes the woman she has always believed herself to be. It’s Wild meets Eat, Pray, Love, a love story and travel memoir that speaks unflinchingly to our current moment, challenging readers to reconsider expectations around sex, love, fealty, and fulfillment.

 

Just Say Me is a smart, sexy, and often self-effacing look at heartache, adventure, self-doubt, and recovery; a touching memoir about exchanging one type of abundance, unexpectedly, for another.​​​