Updated Feb 8, 2026 • ~8 min read
I called Cleo back the next morning.
“Tell me about the memoir offer,” I said.
“Good morning to you too.” Cleo’s voice was amused. She’d been my agent for five years, knew my work habits. “The publisher is Beacon Press. They want a memoir about finding family after abandonment. Working title: ‘The House That Kept Me.’ They’re offering a significant advance.”
“How significant?”
She named a number that made me sit down.
“That’s—that’s a lot of money.”
“It’s a good offer for a timely book. Memoirs about chosen family are hot right now. And your angle—growing up abandoned, inheritance drama, falling in love with the man who read your diaries—it’s compelling.”
“It’s also my life. My pain. The most private things I’ve ever experienced.”
“I know. That’s why I’m not pushing you to take it. This has to be your choice, Juni. Not mine, not the publisher’s. Yours.”
I looked around my writing studio. The quote on the wall from my sixteen-year-old self. The space Jaxon had built because he believed in my work.
“What if I write it and no one cares? What if I expose all my trauma and it doesn’t help anyone?”
“Then at least you’ll have written it. Processed it. Turned pain into art.” Cleo paused. “But Juni? People will care. Your children’s books resonate because they’re honest about hard things. This will too.”
“I’ll need editorial control. I decide what to include about Jaxon. About my parents. About the diaries.”
“Absolutely. I’ll negotiate that.”
“And I want to donate part of the advance. To foster care organizations. To help kids who grew up like Jaxon did.”
“We can make that happen. Anything else?”
“Grammy gets mentioned on the dedication page. Her full name. Acknowledgment that she was my real parent, not the people who left me.”
“Done. So that’s a yes?”
I took a breath. Let myself feel the fear and excitement. “Yeah. That’s a yes.”
“Good. I’ll draw up contracts. Welcome to the memoir world, Juni. It’s going to hurt like hell to write, but it’ll be worth it.”
She wasn’t wrong about it hurting.
I started writing in January. Jaxon and I had settled into comfortable domesticity—he worked on house renovations during the day, I wrote in the studio, we made dinner together every night.
But writing the memoir meant reliving everything. The night my parents left. The Christmas Eve I’d waited at the window. The diary entries full of shame and loneliness.
Some days I’d come downstairs from the studio in tears. Jaxon would hold me without questions, make tea, remind me I was safe now.
“I forgot how much I hurt,” I told him one night. “Reading back through the diaries for the book—I’d blocked out how painful it was. How desperate I felt.”
“You survived it. That’s what matters.”
“But did I? Or am I still that girl, just better at hiding it?”
“You’re still her. But you’re also the woman who fought for this house. Who forgave me for violating her trust. Who chose vulnerability over safety. You’re both versions—wounded and strong simultaneously.”
“The publisher wants to see chapters by March.”
“Can you finish by then?”
“I have to. I’ve been stuck for too long. This story needs to be told.”
By February, I had twenty thousand words. The chapters about childhood were hardest—reliving abandonment, Grammy’s fierce love, the loneliness that never quite went away.
But the chapters about Jaxon—those came easier. Writing about someone who’d seen my worst and stayed. Someone who’d made terrible choices and owned them. Someone who’d proven that love could survive mistakes if you were willing to do the work.
“Can I read it?” he asked one night. “The parts about me?”
“Are you sure? I wrote honestly. About the violation. About how angry I was.”
“I want to read it. Want to see us through your eyes.”
I gave him the manuscript. Went downstairs to give him privacy. Returned an hour later to find him crying.
“This is beautiful,” he said. “And devastating. And so fucking honest.”
“Too honest?”
“No. Exactly honest enough.” He pulled me into his lap. “Thank you for telling our story the right way. Not sanitizing it. Not making me a hero when I was an asshole.”
“You were an asshole who became a hero. There’s a difference.”
“Still. Thank you.”
By March, I’d written sixty thousand words. Cleo loved it. The publisher loved it. They wanted it published by fall—fast turnaround, but they believed it could be a bestseller.
“How do you feel?” Jaxon asked when I sent the final manuscript.
“Terrified. Relieved. Exposed. Proud.” I leaned against him on the couch. “I just told the world I was abandoned. That I believed I was unlovable. That I let someone violate my privacy because I was desperate for connection.”
“You told the world you survived. That you found family. That you’re brave enough to be vulnerable.”
“What if my parents read it?”
“Then they’ll see exactly what they missed. And they’ll have to live with that.”
The book was scheduled for September release. The publisher wanted me to do readings, interviews, a whole publicity tour.
“That sounds like my personal hell,” I told Cleo.
“I know. But it’s part of the deal. People need to see you—the woman who survived and thrived. The writer who turned pain into purpose.”
“Fine. But Jaxon comes with me. I’m not doing this alone.”
“Wouldn’t dream of making you.”
In June, the advance copies arrived. I held my memoir in my hands—actual physical proof that I’d turned twenty-eight years of pain into something meaningful.
The dedication page read:
For Imogene Ross, who taught me that family isn’t who raised you, it’s who chose to stay. You stayed. That made all the difference.
Jaxon read it over my shoulder. “She’d be so proud.”
“I hope so. I hope she knows we figured it out. That her plan worked.”
“She knows. Somehow, she knows.”
I gave advance copies to Mars, Ruby Mae, Des. Watched them read my story and cry.
“This is going to help so many people,” Mars said, hugging the book to their chest. “Every abandoned kid who thinks they’re unlovable needs to read this.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Ruby Mae’s review was simpler: “Imogene is smiling somewhere. You did good, baby girl.”
The week before publication, I was a wreck. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Convinced the book would be torn apart by critics, that I’d exposed myself for nothing.
“What if no one cares?” I asked Jaxon at 2 AM. “What if I wrote sixty thousand words about my trauma and everyone just thinks it’s boring?”
“Then you still wrote it. Still processed it. Still turned pain into art. That matters regardless of what critics say.”
“You’re very wise at 2 AM.”
“I’m very wise always. You’re just usually too stubborn to notice.”
Publication day arrived. The reviews started coming in:
“A searingly honest memoir about finding family in unexpected places.”
“Ross writes about abandonment with the kind of clarity that only comes from surviving it.”
“Impossible to put down. You’ll cry, rage, and ultimately cheer for a woman who refused to let her wounds define her.”
By October, the book had sold fifty thousand copies. By November, it hit the New York Times bestseller list.
“You did it,” Jaxon said, pointing to my name on the list. “You’re a fucking bestseller.”
“We did it. This is our story, not just mine.”
“No. This is your story. Your pain. Your healing. I just got to be part of it.”
“The best part.”
“Obviously. I’m very humble about being the best part.”
The book tour was exhausting but meaningful. At every stop, people lined up to tell me their own stories of abandonment and chosen family. To say that reading my memoir had helped them feel less alone.
“This is why you wrote it,” Jaxon reminded me after a particularly emotional reading. “To help people heal.”
“I know. It’s just overwhelming.”
“You’re allowed to be overwhelmed. You just rewrote your own narrative for the world to see. That’s brave as hell.”
That night, lying in a hotel bed somewhere in Colorado, I realized something:
Writing the memoir hadn’t erased my trauma. Hadn’t magically healed all my wounds.
But it had transformed them.
Turned them from shame into power.
From silence into story.
From pain into purpose.
And that transformation—that was Grammy’s final gift.
Teaching me that our wounds don’t define us.
How we choose to carry them does.
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