The End
Yesterday, I typed “The End.”
The first draft of She Came By It Honestly is complete—nearly 80,000 words, three generations of women, and several years of my life.
This book has been with me through a season of reinvention I never could have scripted. I left my marriage in 2019. Retired as a lawyer in 2022. Wrote the first chapters of my novel and went back to school in 2023. This year, I graduated from Sarah Lawrence with an MFA in Writing. And now, I’ve finished my first draft.
I didn’t know I was a writer. I just knew I had a story to tell. I used to scoff at the notion that authors write to discover the ending. Surely, I thought, they already know how it all turns out. And yet Essie, Flora, and Allison surprised me again and again, showing me what they wanted the story to say.
Here’s an example. In one chapter, Allison recalls reading Kon-Tiki as a child. I chose it from vague middle school memories, thinking it might stand for her longing for adventure. Near the end of the book, I show her reading it aloud to another character. Curious, I looked up the book’s opening lines to see if I might include them:
“Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.”
I stared at the screen, stunned. Did some quiet corner of my mind know Kon-Tiki would offer exactly the right words at exactly the right moment? Or did Allison know, and simply wait for me to catch up? Either way, it felt like magic.
The book isn’t “done.” There will be revisions, edits, maybe big changes. But this milestone matters. It’s proof that I stayed the course, that I built something out of the raw material of memory and imagination.
When I began, I thought I was telling my grandmother’s story. But I see now I was also telling my own—of choosing myself, of finding my voice, of beginning again.
If you’ve ever been in the middle of a reinvention—or dreamed of starting one—I’d love to hear about it. How did it start for you? What have you built since? If you could begin again, what would you write into your own next chapter?
