Ever since I penned my first novel – a masterpiece handwritten on looseleaf paper when I was ten – I have been a writer. 

My books are about what matters in women’s lives and how we navigate radical transformation; they are part non-fiction, part memoir, part social commentary, and always all heart. 

Project Body Love is the story of my quest to find acceptance, respect, and maybe even love for my body after spending a lifetime counting calories and drops of sweat.  What followed was a two-year series of experiments that had me mining the depths of my past, dismantling the effects of Diet Culture on my self-worth, taking up bellydancing, posing for nude photographs, and other daring feats of self-exploration.

Far from being a shiny tale of self-actualization, Project Body Love explores the complexity of being a fat person in a thin-obsessed world, and concludes with an entirely new perspective on the elusive body love – one that was surprising, even to me.

Becoming a mother changes not just the size of your jeans and what you do on a Saturday night: it changes who you are. Motherhood is a total identity shift; a rite of passage that takes at least two to three years for most women to traverse, not six weeks or three months, like we’ve been led to believe.

In times and places long ago and far away, women were ushered through the transition to motherhood, or matrescence, with the the support of a community of other women, with ritual and ceremony to celebrate their shifting lives. Today, mothers are encouraged to “bounce back” and told “not to lose themselves in motherhood,” with everything from social media to social policy denying them the opportunity to experience the power and potential of this tender time in their lives.

As a result, mothers today are in crisis, and rates of postpartum mood disorders are skyrocketing.

Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage is the support these new mothers have been longing for, full of reassurance that they are not broken, they’re becoming.