Story for the Week
When I look in the mirror, I see someone I never expected.
Two days from today, Dennis will have been gone for two years. At this time two years ago, Corinne, my brother-in-law Rodolfo, and I were spending our days in Dennis’s hospital room. Rodolfo and I would switch out overnight because only one person could stay outside of visiting hours. There was a steady stream of people during the day because he was in hospice care, and the three of us were always there.
We had spent almost a year and a half before that (since May 2019) taking care of him, getting him to his appointments and to chemotherapy. Before May 2019, I had been on a weight loss journey. I had successfully lost about 70 pounds. Once we got his diagnosis…well, that kind of fell by the wayside.
I know, I know…you can’t take care of someone else if you don’t take care of yourself. In my head, I knew that. My heart didn’t care. And in those three years and three months since Dennis and I were told he had pancreatic cancer, I’ve had a really hard time getting back into the mindset of focusing on myself.
What I have realized in the last several years, though, is that my story is not unique—unfortunately. As I really thought about it, several of my aunts (on both sides of the family) as well as a cousin were all young widows. They could all sympathize with what I was experiencing. It made me sad, but I didn’t feel so alone.
I recently met a new colleague. We had a video call, and she noticed what I call my “Dennis wall.” I’ve mentioned before that Dennis was a huge supporter of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. He had a number of pictures and scarves that he never did anything with. After he passed, I hung them on the wall (along with some other Dennis-y things), and it makes a nice backdrop for my calls.
When I told this new colleague that my late husband was a Spurs fan, she noticed that I said “late.” She asked about it, not to pry but because she lost her husband about four years ago to cancer, and she hasn’t met many young widows. When I said that we lost Dennis to cancer as well, she asked what type, only to respond that her husband battled pancreatic cancer for nine years before she lost him. And her oldest son is the same age as Corinne. It’s an unusual thing to bond over, and it certainly made an impact on me.
When you strip away the filters and the self-censored content we see (and post) on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and whatever social media platforms we use, everyone is going through something.
I shared Dennis’s journey privately with family and friends, but I didn’t post regular updates on Facebook. My boss knew everything that was happening, but if someone wasn’t a part of my everyday life, they really didn’t know. I didn’t even mention it in a blog post until A Statement of Faith by Corinne Ahyee.
Little did we know when I posted it that he would go into the hospital a few days later and be gone within three weeks. I made two blog posts in September 2020 and then nothing for six weeks. I couldn’t. I got Corinne to school every day, but that was about it. I didn’t have an ounce of motivation for anything else.
I recently finished Amanda Prowse’s newly released memoir. She calls it Women Like Us, and I can see why. Her story isn’t unique either. Her circumstances definitely are, but the way she looked at herself….
There are a lot of women like us out there—women who show the world one thing but not likely what we see when we look in the mirror. Because we don’t want people to see what’s really happening for fear they might think differently about us. But what Amanda reminds us is that people aren’t looking. They’re too busy looking for flaws in their own mirrors.
Everyone is going through something. We are not unique. What’s unique about Amanda is that she was brave enough to tell her story, warts and all. It was a great reminder for me to take things one step at a time, to walk before I run, and to get up when I fall down.
I fell down hard when we lost Dennis…and I got up. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Everyone is going through something. One step at a time.
💜
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for Women Like Us: A Memoir by Amanda Prowse
396 pages
Publisher: Little A (Amazon Publishing UK)
Publication Date: September 6, 2022
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Amazon Publishing UK.
Publisher’s Description
Amanda Prowse has built a bestselling career on the lives of fictional women. Now she turns the pen on her own life.
I guess the first question to ask is, what kind of woman am I? Well, you know those women who saunter into a room, immaculately coiffed and primped from head to toe?
If you look behind her, you’ll see me.
From her childhood, where there was no blueprint for success, to building a career as a bestselling novelist against all odds, Amanda Prowse explores what it means to be a woman in a world where popularity, slimness, beauty and youth are currency―and how she overcame all of that to forge her own path to happiness.
Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious and always entirely relatable, Prowse details her early struggles with self-esteem and how she coped with the frustrating expectations others had of how she should live. Most poignantly, she delves into her toxic relationship with food, the hardest addiction she has ever known, and how she journeyed out the other side.
One of the most candid memoirs you’re ever likely to read, Women Like Us provides welcome insight into how it is possible―against the odds―to overcome insecurity, body consciousness and the ubiquitous imposter syndrome to find happiness and success, from a woman who’s done it all, and then some.
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“How did someone I’d never met know what I was feeling? Because that was what these stories did: they made me feel.”
⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️ This…this…1,000 times this! This is what I love about Amanda Prowse’s fiction, and now she has written her memoir and I feel like we would be besties if we lived on the same continent. 😊 Had we met in a library as children, I imagine us sitting on a beanbag together, nearly the same age, absorbed in our stories, not saying a word, but bonded for life over our love of books.
Amanda’s story is heartbreaking and honest and brave and uplifting and makes me want to be better for myself. She offers up her lifelong journey here, and I have to be honest, it took me a couple of weeks to get through it. It made me reflect on my own struggles. Sometimes it was hard—really hard—and I couldn’t bring myself to keep reading. I needed a break to really appreciate what I felt.
Even after I finished, I needed a couple of days to process it all. I normally jump right into my next book, and I didn’t open another one for a couple of days. (I know that may not sound like a long time, but for a reader, two days is an eternity.)
This memoir doesn’t hide anything, doesn’t sugar-coat. Amanda has put her whole self out there for her readers. I know now why she’s able to describe true grief so well like she did for Merrin in To Love and Be Loved. I understand how she made me feel the panic of something bad happening to a child in The Game. I can see how she so realistically captured Jacks’ feelings that life might have been different if she had made different choices in Perfect Daughter. (All books you should read, by the way.)
Amanda experienced all of it. It wasn’t exactly how she wrote the stories, obviously, but the emotions behind the experiences have fed her stories for years. And that’s how she’s able to make her readers feel so profoundly. I imagine every one of her books has been cathartic for her because the things she has experienced in her life…whew…I can’t even imagine.
She even graces us with her own self-esteem challenges. So many women (men too, but more women) struggle with their self-worth, defining themselves by how they think other people view them. Read that again…how they think other people view them. And Amanda made me think about how I feel about myself and my own challenges in this very moment.
Like Amanda, I have always loved to write. Like Amanda, I once thought I would love to write a book. But as much as I think it would be cool to write for a living, I know that I don’t want to spend my days writing novels. I write about myself in blog posts. People get snippets of me. But it took me two years from the time I decided I wanted to start a blog to actually start the blog. I am not a novelist.
Amanda is a novelist…and now she is a memoir-ist. And I am so grateful for it. She has lived such an incredible life. This book will save someone’s life. I know it.
She says, “Sometimes, the hardest and bravest thing we can do is remain upright when every fibre of our being is pulling us down.”
Thank you, Amanda, for remaining upright…and for sharing with a world full of strangers everything that tried to pull you down.
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