Completed Manuscript

• What We Carry, What We Leave Behind – a memoir

What We Carry, What We Leave Behind is a lyric memoir about growing up in the rural South inside a family shaped by silence, violence, faith, and inheritance—and the long work of reclaiming a self that was never fully allowed to form.

Set against a backdrop of small-town Alabama, the book traces a childhood marked by domestic violence, alcoholism, and unspoken rules about what could be named and what had to be endured. Guns, churches, kitchens, and back roads recur as sites of both intimacy and threat. As the narrator comes of age, survival depends not only on staying safe, but on learning how to disappear—how to become the good daughter, the overachiever, the funny one, the one who doesn’t need anything.

Threaded through these experiences is a quiet, complicated queerness—felt long before it could be spoken, shaped by Southern Baptist doctrine and the understanding that truth carries consequences. The memoir follows the author from childhood through adulthood as she reckons with intergenerational trauma, the cost of silence, and the ways families rewrite violence as love in order to survive themselves.

Told in braided vignettes and lyrical prose, What We Carry, What We Leave Behind resists easy redemption. Instead, it asks what healing actually requires: not forgiveness or forgetting but naming. The book ultimately centers on reclamation—of memory, of voice, and of self—offering a portrait of survival that does not end with endurance but with choice.