The Open Book: A Family Memoir of Adventure, Trauma, and Resilience is a tale in which love and forgiveness triumph. 

The story began fifty years ago when two young dreamers built a life together on an off-grid homestead in the Belizean jungle.

Image of the book

When a hurricane destroyed everything they had worked so hard to create, it was tempting to give up––but they persisted and thrived, until their family fell apart under mysterious circumstances.

Thirty years later, their daughters set out to find the truth of what happened. In The Open Book, multiple voices are woven together to provide a unique portrait of one family’s wild-but-true experience from four different perspectives. This honest and uplifting story celebrates the strength of women, the power of love, and the resilience of the human spirit.

Our Purpose

The purpose of our project is threefold:

  • For ourselves: First and foremost, this has been a personal healing journey. We aspire to reveal the truth, to better understand ourselves, and to release the past and embrace our current lives with wholehearted presence.
  • For our children: We share our story with our children to foster deeper relationships between generations, to allow them to understand their origins, and to break the chains of intergenerational trauma.
  • For the world: We share our story publicly to inspire increased communication among families–both biological and chosen–in hopes of cultivating connection and compassion in a deeply divided world.