Why this book exists
A focused place to understand what is happening
There is a sentence that some people cannot say, and it is not a dramatic sentence, and that is exactly why it is so heavy. I do not want to be a pharmacist. Or a doctor, or an engineer, or a lawyer, or whatever the thing was. In most families that sentence is a Friday-night grumble that leads nowhere and costs nothing. In some families it cannot be said at all, and the person who cannot say it is often the most successful person their family has ever produced. I want to start there, because the woman this book is about has never said it, to anybody, in fourteen years. Not to her father, who worked nights for twenty-nine years. Not to her husband. Not to herself, until she was thirty-six and looking at my carpet.
The writing is designed to reduce shame, bring the underlying pattern into view and give you practical ways to respond without pretending that every life follows the same formula.
