Help Make My Mom a Bestseller

For nearly three years, on my podcast About Your Mother, I’ve been sharing stories of survival, hope, and love launched from the word “mother” – a ubiquitous term deeply rooted in all our becomings.

This universal topic - the influence our mother's story has on our own life - has caught on with so many, and this conversation has no limits. 

I believe that if you want to get to know someone, ask them about their mother.

Guests of my podcast, About Your Mother, have given me the courage to share my story with the world. In sharing their vulnerabilities with me - the depth of their experiences - and baring their soul, I witnessed the power of first-person narratives and how they create a sense of community.

That is why I’m excited to share that Both Sides of Then is available for sale now. The book is something I put my heart and soul into; I bled at that keyboard for years.

So, I have a favor to ask you, can you help me make my mom a bestseller?

Let me take a few steps back and explain how…listen to my Book Launch Podcast or read on.

Early on, a publisher read my manuscript and said, “Wow.” Then, she asked, “What is your goal? What do you want to achieve.”

I said, “I want it to be good. And I want to set myself free. My family, too.”

My book is written to show you the power our mothers and maternal lineage have on the shape of our lives. To also demonstrate that everyone has a story to tell. Every story, no matter how ordinary, has value.

Something happens when you write a book; at some point, it is no longer about you. Your story is not your own. I learned this from my guest Melanie Spring when she so eloquently said, “Your story is not about you.”

Here’s why I am so excited to share this story with you: it’s about finding hope in the shadows of life. It is about loving through pain and mistakes and dishonesty. It is about embracing ourselves, every messy inch.

Acceptance is a powerful word but sometimes elusive.

Both Sides of Then is a story about love and hope. Abandonment and forgiveness. Family and friendship. Sisterhood. Fatherhood. Motherhood. Divorce. Reconciliation. Speaking out. Standing up for yourself.

And most of all, it is about family. It’s the saga of an ordinary family that falls apart and comes back together.

At 13, I learned my parent's painful life secrets, which led to a decades-long quest for the truth.

It took me five years to write the book. For my mother's story, I leveraged photos, conversations on long drives, and letters from the woman who ran the orphanage she lived in. I sat amongst old photos and long hand letters to grasp my mother’s existence.

I write my mother’s story in first person to zip into her skin, to embody what I know about her existence, and to understand myself better. It is what happened to my mom, not exactly how it happened. For many reasons, she didn’t want to write it. Yet, she knew her story should be a book or movie.

“I never wanted to go there; it would hurt too much,” she said.

But, as I uncovered the reality of her young existence, something bigger happened. I wasn’t just putting her life together; I was putting together my own.

The other day, someone asked me, “Why do you think your life is worth a memoir?”

“Because I’ve lived,” I responded.

We all have varying levels of trauma in our lives. Big T, Med T, and Little T.

But I want to be clear about one thing. Shame is a powerful tool. And, trauma of any kind, is about transformation.

Something I’ve learned during my podcast is that people thrive on stories. They thrive on seeing some connection to another person’s narrative. This is what makes us human. This is what makes us great.

If you ever feel stuck, lost, or alone, the best medicine is often a conversation.

So why does the book matter now?

Obviously, there is a slant on reproductive rights and shining a light onto a period in history where society shamed young, unwed mothers.

But there is also something bigger: a sense of belonging. Not only to ourselves but to one another. To empower the reader to own their narrative, the success along with the failures, as a way to get to acceptance and love.

We all have to fight to varying degrees for what we have, for a semblance of peace in our ordinary lives.

So why go there for my mom, too? Because I eventually realized that her pain had seeped itself into my life in many ways. This is the burden and beauty of maternal lineage. We carry previous generations in our bones, in our DNA. And then, at certain periods in a family existence, someone comes in, opens the cabinets, and throws everything out.

As my guest Amy Ferris said, “Writing is a way of revealing my secrets.”

So, while I am writing about my family in some ways, these are my experiences. Not theirs. We all have the narrative we form and no two people live a moment the same. 

To say my mom is excited about the book would not be the case. She often asked me, “Is that the book where you complain about me?”

I replied, “What if it becomes a bestseller?

“Well, I would like that very much.” I never really knew my mother, and I felt cheated.”

So here is my call to action, along with purchasing my book, Both Sides of Then. Can we please make my mom a bestseller? She deserves it.

When you read the book, here is what I promise…you will feel. I wrote the book from a place of making difficult life experiences hopeful.

I want you to laugh and cry.

Ultimately, Both Sides of Then is a book about love. The imperfect kind of love found in families and the deepest of relationships. The love that requires acceptance and forgiveness.

Memoir is about living.

By definition, a memoir is a record of events written by a person who has intimate knowledge of them and is based on personal observation. When you immerse yourself in someone’s story, you recognize similarities.  We are more alike than we realize.

I'm addicted to the stories of the ordinary warriors who have survived unsurmountable obstacles and lived a beautifully simple life.  My mother is one of those people. Her face won't appear in magazines or news channels, but perhaps she should. Maybe society is paying attention to the people who consume the room with their status, but it’s the woman who stands quietly in the corner, who endured some of society's cruelest injustices, that deserves our attention.

I have found in life that we are all in proximity of greatness, whether it’s the person at the coffee shop, the stranger you meet in a security line at the airport, or someone you pass in the grocery store. Someone who, for a brief moment, captivates your attention.

So, let’s make my mom a bestseller.

XO J