Just South of the Solar Plexus

I didn’t just lose my voice. I lost everything that I was and everything I had to give. After a first lifetime of travel and books and moving and culture and art and family and friends. After all that I’d become: I lost myself. Just South of the Solar Plexus, a memoir, is a story about growing my voice and power, and then leaving them in the red dirt of the road when the world made it too hard to be who I was, hold my power, and deliver my voice. So: marriage, baby, cancer, then what? Facing life and facing death, so many of us—especially women—give up our voices, leaving who we are, what matters, and how we can change the world in the dust to whither. Here’s how I reclaimed mine.