The Alchemy of Being a House

A memoir of survival, healing, and the long journey home to our selves-told in the voices of Jen and Ruth: one human, one loyal inner dog who barks when things start to feel unsafe. Jen's life is shaped by pain, adoptive motherhood, queerness, disability, caretaking, relationships, and transformation. From a childhood marked by cancer and family trauma to adult years spent navigating chronic illness and returning to her reclusive mother's house in the Deep South, she invites readers into her inner house-with rooms shaped by rupture, love, and the willingness to stay.

There, in the space between past and present, body and memory, another kind of home begins to take shape. For anyone who has ever felt fractured, scattered, too much, or not enough-this memoir is a map of return. It offers companionship for the walk home. In these pages, the house is both place and metaphor. It's the mind and body. The story. The inner landscapes where memory and meaning dwell. And Ruth, the protector within, is there for it all-watching, guiding, protecting, staying.

This is a post-pathology memoir that lives inside the mess, the mystery, and the beauty of becoming-without needing to be fixed. It honors the alchemic transformation that comes from welcoming what we once tried to run from. Readers drawn to Heavy and The Body Keeps the Score will find company here for the road inward.